CHESTERTOWN — James Koval has been named head coach of Washington College’s men’s and women’s swimming programs.
His hiring was announced in a post on the Washington College athletics website.
Thad Moore, associate vice president and director of athletics, said Koval’s “desire to develop and empower the whole athlete resonated with the search committee and current athletes on the team.”
Koval’s coaching style and vision “are the perfect match for our department and will allow us to continue to get better in and out of the pool,” Moore said in a statement announcing Koval’s hiring.
Koval succeeds Phil Quick, who stepped down after five seasons.
He comes to Chestertown after serving as head coach of the Chatham University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) men’s and women’s swimming and diving programs from 2023 to 2025. During this time, Chatham had five individual Presidents Athletic Conference champions, and Koval was named 2025 PAC Women’s Swim Coach of the Year after the Cougars nearly doubled their conference championship points total from the previous year.
Prior to Chatham, Koval served as the assistant swim coach at Carnegie Mellon University, also in Pittsburgh, from 2021 to 2023.
Before that, Koval worked for five years at various clubs and high schools in western Pennsylvania, including Seneca Valley Swim Club, the Uniontown Area YMCA and Laurel Highlands High School, where he helped the Lady Mustangs to a third-place finish at the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League championships in 2020.
Koval attended West Virginia University, his father’s alma mater, and competed for four years as a long-distance freestyler. He was the Big 12 Scholar-Athlete of the Year in 2018, and still ranks top-five in WVU school history in the 1000 and 1650 freestyle.
He graduated from WVU with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 2018 and a master’s degree in the same in 2020 before deciding to pursue a career in coaching.
Koval is from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, where he began his swimming career in his youth, and also had his first taste of coaching with the local summer swim league.
