By Keith Dunlap on SwimSwam
The University of Florida has identified its next president, and the hire has swimming ties on a couple of fronts.
On Sunday, Florida announced that Santa J. Ono had been unanimously recommended as the sole finalist to serve as the university’s 14th president.
Ono will head to Gainesville after serving the same role at the University of Michigan since July 2022. He is expected to assume his new role this summer and will replace Ben Sasse, who stepped down as president in 2024.
As for the swimming ties, first of all Ono is the older brother of Ken Ono, a math professor at the University of Virginia who has worked with swimmers both inside and outside of the Cavaliers’ program to optimize performance through data and analysis of stroke techniques.
Before this year’s NCAA championships, Ono helped secure special equipment and developed a team of researchers who aimed to improve the speed of swimmers off of the blocks.
The second tie to swimming from Santa Ono’s hiring at Florida is that he has a reputation for being more supportive of athletics than usual for a university president.
While serving as president for the University of Cincinnati from 2012-2016, Ono was credited for shifting more taxpayer-funded subsidies to its athletic department, which included a renovation of Fifth Third Arena on Cincinnati’s campus.
Ex-Cincinnati athletic director Mike Bohn said that Ono was a “game-changer for us in athletics” to the Cincinnati Enquirer in 2016.
When he was introduced as president of Michigan, Ono made it a point to emphasize the importance of athletics.
“It’s a point of great pride for the institution,” he said. “It gets the whole community together. I think there’s a tremendous synergy between academics and athletics.”
That could be music to the ears of a Florida swimming program that saw its men’s team finish 4th and its women’s team 6th at this year’s NCAA championships.
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