Coach Hansen

Coach Jonathan Hansen

For 24 years, I have been teaching and coaching kids how to swim from every level beginning at learn-to-swim all the way through accomplished high school athletes who have competed at the UIL state high school swim meet.

I grew up in the Houston area where I began my competitive swimming journey on the El Campo Red Wave summer swim team in El Campo, Texas.

After showing some promise, I spent three summers attending Longhorn Swim Camp at the University of Texas at Austin where I further developed my knoweldge and skills by learning from University of Texas at Austin head men's and women's swim coaches Eddie Reese.and Jill Sterkel, respectively.

During high school, I started training with locally legendary high school swim coach Bob Button and also supplemented my training by swimming with First Colony Swim Team. 

After graduating from high school, I attended the University of Texas at Austin. While I wasn't fast enough to swim for the Longhorns (most of whom were returning from the Sydney Olympics and went on to win the NCAA Men's Swimming & Diving Championship three of the four years I was there,) I did continue my training with Texas Aquatics under Whitney Hedgepeth and Shaun Jordan and then moved over to Circle C Swimming where I trained under former University of Florida Coach Randy Reese before finally hanging up my competitive goggles.

I came back to the El Campo Red Wave to coach the team after my first summer home from college, and in my first summer we qualified 32 swimmers for the Texas Amateaur Athletic Federation Summer (TAAF) Games of Texas which were held at the Texas A&M University Student Recreation Center that year. Previously, the most the team had qualified for state was eight.

After my family sold our family business, I began teaching and coaching at Wharton High School in Wharton, Texas and coached the Wharton Tiger Sharks summer recreational swim team there, as well.

Today, I teach AP U.S. Government & Politics and AP Macroeconomics at Fort Bend Dulles High School in Sugar Land, and I have been privileged to serve as the head Viking and Lady Viking swim coach for the past 12 years.

Twice I have been honored to be voted by my colleagues as the Texas Interscholastic Swim Coaches Association (TISCA) District 20-6A Girls Coach of the Year.

At the conclusion of high school practices most days, I also coach part-time with Southwestern Aquatics Team (SWAT) which trains out of Fort Bend ISD's Don Cook Natatorium, and three years ago I re-entered the summer recreational swim team coaching field after I was lucky enough to be invited to apply to coach the Sugar Land Sharks.

Additionally, I continue to swim for fitness with the FCST Masters Team.

I bring a little bit of everything I have learned along the way -- from my very first swim lesson (where I believe I spent more time crying than swimming) to my time as a competitive swimmer all the way to the point I am at now, having helped to train and improve the strokes and swimming efficiency of thousands of swimmers -- to help your child learn to efficiently move through the water.

I do so by helping swimmers learn to float by learning the best body position to maintain in the water, and then then I begin working on the kick. Once they have that down, I start adding arm movements by employing a combination of physically manipulating their arms out of the water to build muscle memory to properly implement arm movements in the water, and I also teach them a variety of drills to help emphasize parts of their stroke that they need to work on perfecting.

Whether your goal is for your child is to:

1. Learn to be sufficiently proficient in the water that you don't have to be quite so concerned when your child is at the pool or on family vacations to beaches, rivers, and lakes;

2. Learn to swim as part of a life-long fitness routine; 

3. Begin one's own competitive swimming journey (or to make stroke technique improvements to further advance in that journey;) or

4. Some combination of any or all of the above. 

I am also a Red Cross-certified Lifeguard (which includes certification in CPR and AED.)