Contact Information
Phone:  828-771-3005
E-mail:  apulsifer@warren-wilson.edu

Coach Andrew Pulsifer has enthusiastically coached college teams, clubs, masters and recreational swimmers, triathletes, clinics and all sorts of folks for more than 25 years. Currently serving as Director of Aquatics and Head Coach of the Warren Wilson College pool and swimming team, Andrew enters his third year with the team's return to full membership status in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics.  The Owls look forward to sending its first squad of athletes to a true NAIA National Championship in over 20 years. 

Continuing to build on the enthusiasm generated his first two years is key, with the goal of re-writing every varsity record on the books and establishing a template of a high-quality swimming program full of students who love being college athletes, who find the fun in training while creating lifelong friendships.  Coach Pulsifer loves to share tips, training sets and techniques that have helped hundreds of athletes make subtle and dramatic improvements to their strokes, body awareness and fitness levels while training and competing.

Spending five years as head men's swimming coach and physical education instructor at Washington and Lee University (VA) and seven years teaching and assistant coaching at Emory University (GA), he coached athletes to the NCAA Division III nationals every year, with over 40 athletes earning some form of NCAA individual National Championship, All-America honors, GTE Academic All-America awards and top-10 team awards.

Andrew also spent time away for the pool deck living in Maine and working for five years with L.L.Bean in Customer Satisfaction and Retail. During this time, two summers were spent on Maine's coastal waters with the Outdoor Discovery School as a Registered Maine Sea Kayaking Guide guiding tours and providing paddling instruction. He holds certification with the American Swimming Coaches Association, the College Swimming Coaches Association of America, the National Swimming Pool Foundation and the American Red Cross.

Andrew always finds his way to local water, and has continued to compete with and/or coach masters groups while living in Georgia, Virginia, Maine, and now Asheville, North Carolina, at both open water and pool meets. He's a seven-time U.S. Masters Swimming National Champion, recently winning the age-group titles in both the 2010 USMS open water one-mile championships in Huntersville, NC, and the 2010 USMS 200-yard backstroke in Atlanta.

While in college Andrew qualified for the USA National Championships from 1986-1988 and swam for the Mission Bay Makos, helping to win the team championships at the 1987 USA Swimming Short Course National Championships in Boca Raton, Florida.

Andrew is a 1988 graduate of Virginia Tech (B.A. broadcasting/communications studies) and earned his master's degree from Georgia State University in education & sports administration in 1996. He also enjoys hiking, trail running, biking, ocean kayaking and body surfing. He loves to do all these things with his wife, Emily, and their two awesome boys.