Matt Donovan has spent four seasons as the head coach of the LIU women’s swimming team, building one of the youngest programs in the Northeast Conference into one of the strongest in the league.
The 2019-20 season marked one of the best in LIU swimming program history. The team, amongst several other individual honors, earned the Northeast Conference’s Team Sportsmanship Award, as voted on by the league’s coaches. Amanda Peren was named the NEC’s Scholar Athlete of the Year for the sport of women’s swimming, as well as being named the NEC’s Swimmer of the Meet at the 2020 NEC Championships. At that event, she set two conference and meet records, including breaking a record that had stood for 14 years. Peren was also named the Swimmer of the Meet at ECACs, after leading LIU to a second place finish. Donovan was named Coach of the Meet at that event.
Under Donovan’s lead, LIU women’s swimming has seen dozens of school records, and NEC and ECAC individual and relay championships in four seasons, but the most impressive has been the team’s performances in the classroom. In every single semester under Donovan, the Sharks have earned CSCAA Academic Honors. In the fall of 2019, LIU had the fourth highest GPA in Division I women’s swimming.
Donovan, who has extensive coaching experience at both the collegiate and club level, came to LIU in the fall of 2016, after spending two seasons as an assistant on both the men's and women's side at the University of Connecticut. In his two seasons with the Huskies, he coached 37 All-Conference honorees, multiple program records broken, saw the team finish second at the American Athletic Conference Championships in 2015, and win both the 2015 and 2016 Copa Coqui Invitational in Puerto Rico.
Donovan, who also spend time as an assistant coach at Rutgers under four-time Big East Coach of the Year Chuck Warner, is also a highly decorated club coach.
The head swim coach of the Somerset Valley YMCA Swim Team, Donovan spent 15 years with the team, overseeing the growth of the program from 46 swimmers to well over 500 participants when he left in 2014. Donovan saw great success while with Somerset Valley, leading the team to the New Jersey State Championship in 2006, and every year from 2010 to 2014. He was tabbed as the New Jersey All-Star team coach in 2003 and 2004.
On the national level, Donovan was awarded the 2013 YMCA National Coach of the Meet honor for the Long Course Championships held in Atlanta, Georgia. He has coached two National Camps (2010, 2011) at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and assisted at the USA Zone Select Camp in Baltimore in 2012. His Somerset Valley teams have been honored four times by the USA Club Excellence program bronze (2010) and silver (2012, 2013, 2014).
He also spent time as an assistant coach at Farmington High School in Connecticut, and as the head age group coach at Wheeler YMCA in Plainville, Conn. There, he produced several talents, including Madison Kennedy who has represented Team USA consistently since 2009, won six international medals, set one world record and won the NCAA team championship with Cal Berkeley in 2009.
A decorated swimmer in his own right, Donovan was a two-time captain of the Keene State College squad, qualified for the conference championship each season, made ECAC's twice, and helped break multiple team relay records. He received his bachelor's degree in social sciences from KSC and went on to earn a master's in Education from the University of Phoenix in 2004. USA Swimming had had him as a guest presenter twice for their webinar series that can be found on
usaswimming.org. He is also a guest author for the United States Masters Swimming on-line magazine, and competes in Master’s Swimming to this day.
