From the minute Augie Busch entered the press conference room at McKale Center, he was giddy, smiling like a kid on Christmas morning.
It was a small crowd for Busch’s introduction as Arizona’s newest swimming coach, just six years after his father Frank Busch, a longtime UA coaching legend, left the program to run USA Swimming. Frank wasn’t present, but Augie’s mother, Pattie, and sister, Molly, were. Lacey Nymeyer, an Arizona swimming legend, was in the room, too.
When Busch entered, donning a red, long-sleeved Arizona button-up, he sat down next to athletic director Dave Heeke. Someone pointed out that he was smiling an awful lot.
“It’ll be hard to stop,” he responded.
For Busch — hired on July 8 to replace longtime UA staffer Rick DeMont, who retired this offseason — this is a homecoming, the town where he grew up, the college he attended and then, on his father’s staff, coached for eight years when Arizona swimming was at its best.
“What it means to come home … wow,” Busch said. “Not many people in any industry get the chance at their dream job, and that’s exactly what this is.”
Busch called his previous job at Virginia, where he coached the Cavaliers for four seasons and helped the women to three ACC championships and two top-five finishes at the NCAAs, a destination job. Still, Arizona was always the destination job for Busch.
“I made it clear from the very get-go that this was the only place I would’ve left the University of Virginia for,” Busch said. “What it means to return to your alma mater, to your hometown, to a program that I’m proud enough to say I helped build to unprecedented levels … it’s just an incredible feeling. This place means so much to me.”
For Heeke, this was his first coaching hire since replacing Greg Byrne as athletic director in February, and in the end it made sense to go back to a name familiar to Arizona athletics, even if Heeke didn’t necessarily have direct ties to him.
Quickly, Heeke learned that Busch was the right man for the job, even if it took the Wildcats 50 days to come to a final decision.
DeMont’s “retirement was somewhat of a surprise and put us in a position where we had to step back and look at our program and figure out where we wanted to go, the pieces we needed, what the needs were, what the landscape was overall,” Heeke said. “We took a long period of time … I think taking the right amount of time is important to get to the right place.”
Heeke talked to people familiar with the program, including Frank Busch, and received a lot of “national interest”, he said, but it always came back to one name — Augie Busch.
“All of those conversations and all of those discussions kept leading back to Augie,” Heeke said. “This is a destination job, this is a destination place. We have someone here who wants to be here for a long, long time.”
Busch is inheriting a once-great program that, relative to the program’s reputation and history, has struggled in recent years. When his father was coach, the women’s team finished in the Top 10 at NCAAs every year from 1991-2011. Only three times did the team finish worse than sixth (in 1991, 1994 and 2003). UA finished in the top three on eight occasions.
In 2008, both the UA men’s and women’s teams won NCAA titles.
The last three years, the women finished 15th in 2015, 12th in 2016 and 16th this year.
On the men’s side, in Busch’s 21 years the Wildcats had 19 Top 10 finishes and 10 in the Top 5.
The last three years, the UA men finished 13th in 2015, 16th in 2016 and 24th this year.
Arizona has some individual talent, notably Katrina Konopka (freestyle, backstroke) on the women’s side and Justin Wright (butterfly) on the men’s, but Busch has some work to do.
Konopka, entering her junior season, said she was initially upset when she heard DeMont was retiring, but when she found out Busch was replacing him she was “incredibly excited.”
“I know it will be a big change, but I can’t wait to have a fresh start,” Konopka said, “It’s a new beginning for all of us.”
After Frank Busch left for USA Swimming in 2011, Byrne hired Eric Hansen from Wisconsin to replace him, and that didn’t exactly work out. After an extended leave of absence during the 2013 season, Hansen resigned and Byrne promoted DeMont from assistant coach.
The Wildcats have been trying to pick up the pieces ever since.
“I’m certainly aware that this program is in a place that can make some strides on the national level and on the conference level,” Busch said.
“It’s going to be challenging to get back to a place where we were top five year in, year out. But I can assure you, my staff and I will do everything in our power to make that happen.”
The moment DeMont announced his retirement, Busch said his phone blew up with messages and phone calls, many from Arizona alumni. He was a popular speculative choice for the job both inside and outside the UA program, and, he said, he certainly thought about the possibility of it even before Heeke and senior associate director of athletics Erika Barnes contacted him.
He spoke with his father throughout the process, too, for advice about how to approach the job, the job search and this big sort of decision.
Who knows better about Arizona swimming than Frank Busch?
In December, Frank retired and relocated to Tucson with Pattie, and Busch’s brother, Sam, will be on part of his UA coaching staff, as he was at Virginia.
The Busch family is back in the Old Pueblo, and Augie couldn’t be happier.
“When I get to sit in a chair upstairs (at McKale) that my father once sat in, that he put so much work and energy and honor into this program …,” Busch said, “I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”
