Inside HOKIE SPORTS | Vol. 10 No. 6 | June 2018

IHS extra Right before he accepted the associate head coaching position within the Auburn University swimming and diving program in 2016, Sergio Lopez Miro promised daughter Harley and son Cobi that this career stop would be an extended one. After all, to this point, his coaching career had taken him and his family from Chicago to Morgantown, West Virginia to Jacksonville, Florida and to Singapore in a span of roughly 15 years. So Lopez Miro wanted to settle down and focus on a more important task. “I took an assistant job [at Auburn] to be more with my kids,” he said. “I wanted to do my job and help Auburn get to the top, but also, I wanted to have more time to spend with my daughter before she went to college and with my son.” A coaching shake-up at Auburn, however, and a persuasive phone call from Virginia Tech Director of Athletics Whit Babcock resulted in Lopez Miro packing his U-Haul once again, as Babcock tabbed the Barcelona, Spain native to be the head coach of Virginia Tech’s swimming and diving programs. Lopez Miro takes over for Dr. Ned Skinner, who led the Hokies’ programs for 20 years before resigning in mid-April. Lopez Miro is one of two head coaching hires made by Babcock in an unusually busy early summer. Babcock also selected Kennesaw State head coach Pete D’Amour to oversee the Tech softball program after relieving longtime head coach Scot Thomas of his coaching duties in late May. D’Amour spent two seasons as the head coach at Kennesaw State, where he led the Owls to a 79-37 record and two postseason appearances, including an NCAA regional showing this spring. Prior to coaching at Kennesaw, he spent 10 years as an assistant at Missouri. Both coaches cited their familiarity with Babcock as reasons for taking their respective positions. Lopez Miro spent four seasons as the head coach at West Virginia—he led the Mountaineers’ men’s team to a BIG EAST title—during the time when Babcock worked as a fundraiser for The Mountaineer Athletics Club. “I always liked Whit. I always respected him,” Lopez Miro said. “He called me, and we talked for about an hour and a half. The way he said things to me and what he wanted to do and the reasons why he wanted to bring me in and take care of my family … I was pretty much sold there. I told Whit that I wasn’t sure I could do it because I promised my son that he wasn’t going to move, so I needed to talk with my kid. “Finally, what we’re going to do is my wife [Sandy] and son are going to stay back for a year [his daughter is now a freshman at Princeton], and I’ll move here and coach. My son understands that it’s an amazing opportunity, and that I need to do it.” Lopez Miro inherits a men’s and women’s program that had been consistently among the top five teams in the ACC since the Hokies joined the conference, but both dipped this year in part because of graduation losses from the previous season. The Tech men finished sixth at the ACC Championships, while the women came in seventh, with only one gold medalist combined between the two programs. But Lopez Miro brings a lot of credibility and experience to Tech. For starters, he is a two-time Olympian who won a bronze medal in the 200-meter breaststroke for Spain in the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. He also has coached 18 Olympic swimmers. He helped build the programs at Northwestern (as an associate head coach) and at West Virginia. During his time in Morgantown,heearned BIG EAST Coach of the Year honors on two occasions. He left West Virginia in 2007 to return to Spain and care for his mother, but returned and landed a job at the Bolles School in Jacksonville, leading the boys team there to four national titles. In 2014, he left Florida to oversee the Singapore Swimming Association, and he served as the head coach for Singapore in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro—a position he held for two years before going to Auburn. Lopez Miro, who swam collegiately at Indiana and graduated from American University, has elected to keep respected diving coach Ron Piemonte and assistant Josh Huger to create some stability within the Tech program. That, plus an awesome facility in the Christiansburg Aquatic Center, leave the 49-year-old optimistic about his situation in Blacksburg. “It’s pretty healthy,” Lopez Miro said of the program. “I inherited a very good group of kids, and Josh and Ned [Skinner] did a good job with recruiting this past year. I’m excited. I come from a different country, and one of the things I’ve learned is that America is the land of opportunity. You don’t need to have everything to be the best. Many universities have many things that they take for granted, and we have New TECH head coaches come aboard in swimming and diving and softball Sergio Lopez Miro and Pete D’Amour have proven themselves as head coaches at other stops, and close connections to Tech AD Whit Babcock helped lead them to Blacksburg by Jimmy Robertson inside.hokiesports.com 43 Continued on page 44 Sergio Lopez Miro

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