Bill Roberts enters his 22nd season as the head coach of the Navy men’s swimming team and his 25th year as part of the program’s coaching staff in the fall of 2024.
He enters the season having posted a dual-meet record of 209-69 at Navy and a 248-105 record overall.
Roberts has led the Mids to the Patriot League title in each of his 20 seasons on The Yard in which the meet was contested. He has been tabbed as the league’s coach of the year 11 times.
In addition to the team’s success at the Patriot League Championship, Navy also has won 14 ECAC Championship crowns in the last 15 years in which the meet was held. Roberts has been named as the ECAC Coach of the Year following 13 of those team titles.
Navy also has been successful during the regular season under Roberts. The Mids have posted double figure win totals in 11 seasons and have compiled a 76-2 against Patriot League competition.
The 2023-24 season saw the Mids post an 8-3 record during the regular season, with those three defeats coming to Penn State, Notre Dame and Princeton. Navy also won the Patriot League and ECAC Championship meets.
Navy has posted an 88-28 record over the last decade. Included among Navy’s losses during this span have been defeats to Auburn, Georgia Tech, LSU, Michigan, North Carolina, Notre Dame, Penn State, Princeton and Virginia.
Some of the memorable campaigns for the Mids in the early years under Roberts include 2011, when Navy became the first team to defeat Princeton in the two-decade existence of DeNunzio Pool, and 2012, when Navy defeated both Penn State and Virginia before becoming the first team in league history to win all 18 swimming events at the league championship.
With the success of the overall program, Navy also has consistently qualified individual athletes for national meets under Roberts. The program returned to the NCAA Championship Meet for the first time in nearly a decade during his inaugural season of 2004, with four swimmers competing in a combined six individual events at the national meet –– which included Noah White’s ‘A’ cut time in the 50 free –– and earning Honorable Mention All-America certificates in a pair of relay events.
Navy again sent multiple swimmers to the 2009 NCAA Championship, with both Adam Meyer and Erik Hunter competing in a trio of events. Meyer would join the illustrious list of Navy swimmers to have garnered All-America accolades when he received Honorable Mention All-America honors that year. He then duplicated his efforts in 2010 to become the first Navy swimmer in 40 years to garner multiple All-America accolades in a career. Meyer’s brother, Mark, joined Justin Vagts in competing at the 2011 NCAA Championship.
Included among the program’s seven competitors at the 2014 NCAA Championship was Tom Duvall, who advanced to the championship final in the 500 free that year to bring another All-America accolade back to The Yard. Most recently, Marlin Brutkiewicz closed his four-year career by swimming in three events at the 2017 NCAA Championship, Luke Johnson qualified in three events for the 2020 meet and four individual swimmers plus a relay team competed at the 2021 championship. In 2022, Caleb Mauldin made his second-straight trip to the national meet.
Additionally during the Roberts era, Navy swimmers have annually taken part in national meets such as the World Championship Trials, the World Military Games, the ConocoPhillips National Championship, the USA Swimming Spring Championship and Arena Grand Prix meets.
The Mids also are regulars at the U.S. Olympic Trials as over 50 have qualified for the event under Roberts.
Success has also been achieved by the men’s swimming and diving team in the classroom under Roberts. The team as a whole has been recognized multiple times as an Academic All-America Team by the College Swimming Coaches Association of America. In 2017, Ryan Bailey was tabbed as the Patriot League Overall Male Scholar-Athlete of the Year, earned a second Academic All-America nod and garnered an NCAA Post Graduate Scholarship. Micah Oh was named the league’s overall student-athlete of the year in ‘21, the same year he received the NCAA Elite 90 Award. Jackson Schultz earned Third-Team Academic All-America honors in 2023 after having been named the league’s scholar-athlete of the year in 2022 and ‘23.
Roberts first arrived at Navy during the summer of 1997 when he joined Lee Lawrence’s coaching staff as an assistant coach. In three seasons together the Lawrence-Roberts duo guided Navy to a 27-10 record, including an 18-9 mark in the Eastern Intercollegiate Swimming League. Roberts coached Navy’s 200 freestyle relay team that won the 1999 EISL title, and helped develop sprinter Clint Cornell to a 2000 Olympic Trials appearance and to the 2001 EISL 50-yard freestyle title.
A 1992 graduate of Springfield College, where he was a four-year letter winner and served as team captain for two seasons, Roberts began his coaching career upon graduation as the head coach of the women’s team at Wells College in his hometown of Aurora, N.Y. After two seasons at Wells, he served as a graduate assistant coach at East Carolina, where he also earned a master’s degree in athletic administration. In the summer of 1996, he joined the Villanova program for one year before coming to the Naval Academy.
Roberts left Navy in 2000 to become the head coach at Colgate, during which time his men’s and women’s teams combined to post a three-year record of 39-36.
Roberts and his wife, Nicole, have three sons –– Will, who swam at Michigan and Cal, Nick and Jackson, who is a junior on the Navy lacrosse team.
