Joel White joined the Mines staff as an assistant coach in 2019. He was brought on as a fulltime assistant coach in the fall of 2023 before departing in the summer of 2024. White brought a long list of experience in swimming and teaching to the program, including assistant swim coach positions at Utah, Notre Dame, and Denver.
In his five seasons at Mines, White helped the Orediggers produce 25 all-American finishes at the NCAA Division II Swimming & Diving Championships along with numerous All-RMAC performances, pools records, and program records along the way.
White's most-recent stop prior to Mines was at the University of Denver from 2009-12. It was there he got to know Coach McDaniel as the duo helped the Pioneers stack up a plethora of accolades. Among the awards and honors were DU’s first female NCAA All-American, back-to-back men’s and women’s Sunbelt Conference crowns, and the highest men’s team grade-point average in all of NCAA Division I.
Before coaching at the University of Denver, White was an assistant swimming coach for the women’s team at the University of Notre Dame. Following White’s arrival in South Bend, Ind., the Irish experienced a turnaround in a team culture that saw Notre Dame’s women finish as high as #25 in the nation at the NCAA Division I Swimming & Diving Championships to go along with four Big East Conference titles. Furthermore, from 2005-09, White helped develop three NCAA All-Americans, qualified 11 student-athletes for the U.S. Olympic Trials, and even served as the Interim Women’s Swimming Head Coach in 2008. His brief time at the helm included a top-eight finish at the US Open for the first time in nearly a decade.
White was also an assistant swim coach at the University of Utah while pursuing his master's degree. His tenure with the Utes from 2003-05 saw the then-Mountain West Conference program produce three individual qualifiers for the NCAA Division I Swimming & Diving Championships – the first national qualifiers in nine years. Utah also won its first conference title as White not only coached and developed swimming and dry-land workouts for all groups, but also coordinated recruiting of national and international athletes.
The first collegiate coaching stop for White was the University of Texas Swim Camp. After coming on as a camp counselor, he was made an assistant coach, a position nobody outside of the Longhorns’ NCAA staff has ever held. Under that title, White supervised the counseling staff during all activities, designed classroom sessions on technique, coached dry-land workouts for 85 athletes at a time, and had the opportunity to learn from legendary Olympic and UT men’s coach Eddie Reese for three years.
White is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a degree in mechanical engineering, and holds a master's from the University of Utah in Psychosocial Aspects of Sport.Â
