Pitt Adds Olympian Gideon Louw as Associate Head Coach
South African Olympic swimmer Gideon Louw has joined the coaching staff at Pitt as an associate head coach.
Louw has spent the last six seasons at Auburn University, his alma mater, as an assistant. He’s overseen 32 All-Americans there, including the SEC women’s 400 freestyle relay champions in 2019. The men’s team has finished in the top 12 in each of the last two NCAAs, and the women were 19th at NCAAs in 2024.
“We are incredibly excited to add Gideon to our staff as an associate head coach,” head coach Chase Kreitler said in a university statement. “It is clear that Gideon’s mentorship-based coaching approach and focus on positive relationships with student-athletes will fit right in with our coaching staff at Pitt.”
At Auburn, Louw helped lead five Olympians to the Tokyo games, where he was the head coach of the Guatemalan national team.
Louw represented his country at the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, finishing ninth in the 50 free in London and 12th in Beijing. He won three medals at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, including bronze in the men’s 50 freestyle, behind Canada’s Brent Hayden and his fellow South African Roland Schoeman.
At Auburn, he won three NCAA relay championships, including as part of the 200 medley relay NCAA record. He finished third in the 100 free and fifth in the 50 in his senior year of 2010. The year prior, he was part of the Tigers’ eighth NCAA championship. He received his degree in exercise science in 2011.
Louw began his college career at Indian River State College in Florida. The 2008 NJCAA Swimmer of the Year, he was inducted to the school’s hall of fame in 2013 and the NJCAA Hall of Fame in 2014.
As a coach, he spent two seasons as a graduate assistant at Florida State, then three years as an associate head coach at the University of Minnesota. He earned his master’s degree in exercise science in Tallahassee in 2014. He helped turn around the Golden Gophers relay program from zero NCAA qualifiers the year before he arrived to 14 in the next three years, one shy of the maximum.
“His experience working with Olympians, NCAA All-Americans, SEC Champions, and Big Ten Champions will make an immediate impact on the performance of our team as we continue to build the program and seek to move up nationally,” Kreitler said. “Gideon will primarily serve as the lead coach with our sprint athletes and have a significant impact on our relays as we look to build on the momentum we’ve started the past two years. We are excited to welcome Gideon, his wife Shanda and their two kids AJ and Lyndee to Pittsburgh!”
