In August 2019, two swim coaches at San Jose (Calif.) State reported allegations they had heard about University of Kentucky head swimming coach Lars Jorgensen to a Title IX officer at their school. The allegations were that Jorgensen had been in a relationship with one of his swimmers at an earlier coaching stop and that he had sexually assaulted a woman on the swim staff at Kentucky. The Title IX officer at San Jose State then alerted a counterpart at Kentucky.
It was at least the third time Kentucky was made aware or should have been aware of an allegation of misconduct by Jorgensen.
In June 2012, Mark Howard, a former assistant swimming coach at the University of Toledo, sent separate emails to Gary Conelly, then Kentucky’s head swim coach, and UK athletic director Mitch Barnhart. “This is no joke at all and I cannot stomach the fact that (Jorgensen) will be coaching women again,” Howard wrote to Conelly, who had recently added Jorgensen as an associate head coach. He informed both men that a swimmer had told him that she had been in a sexual relationship with Jorgensen while he coached her at Toledo.
In October 2014, a former Toledo softball coach repeated the allegation that Jorgensen had been in a “long-term romantic relationship” with a student-athlete in a…
