International awards for director of swimming

Plymouth College's Director of Swimming, Jon Rudd, has received not one, nor two but three international swimming accolades and awards in one month.

Rudd, who is also head coach at Plymouth Leander has had a highly productive year at the helm of Britain's most successful swimming programme and these awards come as the icing on the cake for him at the end of an amazing 2013.

First was up was Rudd receiving the award of '2013 World Swimming Coach of the Year for Junior Athletes', awarded by swimvortex.com, arguably the world's most respected and most read online swimming resource. Rudd's work with Plymouth College swimming scholar, Ruta Meilutyte, at the 2013 World Junior Championships in Dubai in August were cited as the primary reason for this, with Meilutyte taking four gold medals at the meet in a season in which she also broke three world records.

Secondly, Rudd is named as '2013 European Swimming Coach of the Year' as part of the 2013 Swammy Awards presented by the highly regarded USA-based swimswam.com website. His work with Ruta Meilutyte, Ben Proud and Julie Meynen were all cited as the reasons for this, all three athletes are truly world class and all from three different European nations (Lithuania, Great Britain and Luxembourg respectively). Jeff Grace of swimswam.com said that this is "a great example of what makes Rudd the true 'European' coach of the year - he has touched many different countries on the old continent. Meilutyte has broken 11 Lithuanian National Records in 2013, Proud broke a British Record, and in just a short time under Rudd, Meynen has broken 9 senior national records, and like Meilutyte, she's only 16, so that's accompanied by a slew of age group records".

Last but not least, Rudd was also named '2013 International Swimming Coach of the Year' by the International Society of Swimming Coaching. The ISOSC publishes the Journal of the International Society of Swimming Coaching and annually holds the International Swimming Coaching Conference on Swimming and Science. ISOSC is a society bringing together members from 50 countries all over the world, recently publishing the International Journal of Swimming Kinetics for the first time. Rudd has now been asked to become an Advisory Board member of the ISOSC as a result of his work in recent years.

Having already won the 2013 British Swimming Coaches Association Coach of the Year award for the second successive year and having previously been named as England Head Coach for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Rudd can look forward to another season in which, his athletes and his coaching team will look for even bigger and better things in the new year.