SEATTLE, March 21, 2005 Emil Kossev, head coach at Seattles Pocock Rowing Center (www.pocockrowing.org) and a member of the 2004 U.S. Olympic rowing team coaching staff, has been nominated by USRowing for the United States Olympic Committees "Doc" Counsilman Science Award.
Forty-three Olympic and Pan American sports organizations selected their nominees for the USOCs annual coach recognition program recognizing the national, developmental, and volunteer coach of the year in the United States and the Counsilman Science Award. The winners will be honored April 30 May 1 at the USOCs Coach of the Year recognition dinner at the Home Depot Center in Los Angeles.
The Counsilman Science Award promotes the use of sport science in achieving athletic excellence among United States national team coaches and is named for the late U.S. Olympic swimming team coach, inventor, author, and professor James Doc Counsilman. Counsilman is well known as the coach of Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz and coached two of the most successful mens swimming teams in U.S. Olympic history at the 1964 (Tokyo) and 1976 (Montreal) Olympic Games. During those Games, U.S. swimmers captured 48 medals (17 gold, 18 silver, 13 bronze), including five gold medal relays. In 1976, the U.S. men won 12 of a possible 13 gold swimming medals and brought home over two-thirds of all possible medals.
Kossev, 39, is a first-time nominee for the Counsilman Award and is being recognized for his practical application of sport science and technical video analysis in the preparation of high-performance rowers for elite competition. The native of Gabrovo, Bulgaria has coached elite-level rowers in Seattle since 1995 and in 2004 earned his first spot on an Olympic team as a sculling coach for the U.S. lightweight womens double sculls.
Since 1992, twenty-five Kossev coached crews have earned medals in elite international competition (World Championships, Pan American Games, Nations Cup, Olympic Qualification Regatta) including a bronze at the 2004 World Championships, two silver and two bronze medals at the 2003 Pan American Games and gold in the mens single sculls at the 2000 Olympic Qualification Regatta and gold in the mens single sculls at the 2000 Slovakian Olympic Trials. His athletes have also won golds in the mens single sculls at the 2004 U.S. Olympic Trials and womens single sculls at the 2000 U.S. Olympic Trials. Kossev is a four-time Bulgarian national team member and won thirteen Bulgarian national sculling titles between 1982 and 1991.
Counsilman combined his expertise in physiology and psychology to apply advanced techniques to swimming that had never before been attempted including underwater filming to observe the stroke mechanics of his swimmers. His findings on lift versus drag are still being studied by coaches today. In 1968 he published The Science of Swimming which, considered by many as the bible of competitive swimming, explains complicated scientific principles of the sport in language that anyone can understand. The book was the start of Counsilmans serious research in biomechanics that lead to several inventions of swimming apparatus that are considered staples in the sport today, including pace clocks, the isokinetic swim bench and anti-wave lane markers.
Throughout his career, Counsilman earned a reputation of success at the collegiate and international levels. At Ohio State he won a national championship in the butterfly-breaststroke and in 1943 set a worlds best time in the event. He later coached the Indiana men's swim team to an eventual 20 consecutive Big Ten wins, six NCAA championships (1968-73) and 12 AAU wins. Sixty of Counsilmans swimmers went on to be Olympians. In 1979 at age 58, four years after being diagnosed with Parkinsons disease, Counsilman became the oldest person at the time to successfully swim the English Channel. He retired from coaching in 1991 having gone 285-41 in 33 years, including 18 undefeated seasons.