
SFA HPA COACHING STAFF
Coaches
Liam Donnelly | SFA HPA Executive Director & Head Coach
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Coach Liam has over 35 years of coaching experience in competitive swimming. As the former Head Varsity Swim Coach of Simon Fraser University, he has coached 15 NAIA national championship teams. His swimmers have represented Canada in World Championships, World University Games, Commonwealth Games, Pan Pacific Games and the Pan American Games, setting three Canadian records, with 31 swims ranked in Canada's all-time top 25. His swimmers have won 374 NAIA individual national event titles, 143 individual national champions, 62 NAIA national championship records, top 10 NCAA DII team finish for Men (2019) and Women (2013), 92 NCAA All-American individual swims, 42 NCAA All-Americans, 12 NCAA Scholar All-Americans, and 2 NCAA individual national champions. Coach Liam is a 5-time recipient of the NAIA National Coach of the year award. Coach Liam will be working with SFA Pro and Elite Groups, focusing on development of swimmers at the National Championship, Canadian Trials and International levels of competition.
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Sean Nugent | SFA HPA Strength & Conditioning Coach
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Coach Sean began his swimming career in 2002 with SFA when he transitioned from BC Summer Swimming. Sean spent many years swimming both at Simon Fraser University and SFA culminating with representing Canada in 2009 and 2010. This experience around the high-performance teams that supported Team Canada is what ultimately led Sean to his chosen career path of athlete preparation. Sean began coaching in 2002 with the Burnaby Mountain Mantas. He transitioned to a strength and conditioning focus – working with various national team members in field hockey, figure skating, weightlifting and most notably the Canadian mogul ski team for 5 years while he was with the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific.
Coach Sean holds a masters degree in strength and conditioning from St. Mary’s University in London England. Many of the athlete’s Sean worked with have gone on to represent Canada at the Olympic Games, with several winning Olympic medals. Sean was recognized in 2019 with a Petro Canada Award for Coaching Excellence for his contribution to Mikael Kingsbury’s preparation en route to his double gold medal performance at the 2019 Freestyle Skiing World Championships.

