Ray Bussard

Ray Bussard (August 12, 1928 – September 22, 2010) was a Hall of Fame collegiate and Olympic swimming coach from the United States, best known for coaching the University of Tennessee Swimming team from 1968-1989. A specialist in developing sprinters, his overall career winning percentage in dual meets was .926, an unprecedented achievement. Earlier, he had been a gifted collegiate athlete at Bridgewater College and had coached field sports in Tennessee and Virginia High Schools. in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His overall record for high school coaching was 43-24-12 in football, 241-99 in basketball, 128-52 in baseball, and 172-7 in track and field.

During the summertime, Ray began teaching swimming and life-saving courses for the Red Cross, where he started his career as a swim coach. He founded the Chattanooga Swim League in 1960 and coached it through 1966. Bussard gained support for the team by adding tradition and ritual to meets, having team members wear coonskin caps, emptying a bottle of Tennessee swim water into an opponent's pool, and adding spirit by featuring the swim team's cheerleaders, the Vol Timettes.

Bussard served as a coach for the USA at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, where he was a sprint coach, and 1979 and 1983 Pan American Games as well as the 1979 Pan Pacific Games. and into the American Swimming Coaches Association's Hall of Fame in 2008. In 2000, Bussard was inducted into the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame. He was also a member of the Tennessee Swimming Hall of Fame, which he had established himself, the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame, the Knoxville Sports Hall of Fame and the Bridgewater College Sports Hall of Fame.

According to a leading Knoxville newspaper, by 1985, Bussard had coached more than 35 coaches and athletic directors.

In 1989, the year of his retirement as coach, the University of Tennessee Indoor Aquatic Pool was named for Bussard to honor his legacy.

Bussard died on September 22, 2010, at Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center in Knoxville. He had suffered from Diabetes, which had worsened in the six months before his death.