The Georgia Tech Aquatic Center, which served as the venue for swimming and diving at the 1996 Olympics, is getting a little bit of a facelift in advance of next March’s NCAA Division I championships.
An unspecified donation from former Georgia Tech swimmer Richard Bergmark will add two new video scoreboards to the facility, just in time for the NCAA championships. The facility already had a great scoreboard, but will now update the technology.
The scoreboards are just two of the changes to the building. The facility will also get a new name: the McAuley Aquatic Center, named after former swim coach James Herbert “Herb” McAuley. McAuley was a swimmer at Georgia Tech, but his lasting contribution was coaching swimmers from 1965 to 1987, the second-longest tenure of any Georgia Tech coach.
Bergmark’s donation is also creating an endowment for the Yellow Jackets to support the swimming and diving teams and provide for continual facility upkeep. The venue had a major retrofit after the 1996 Games. The venue was a partially open-air facility for the Games, and was fully enclosed after that. The pool hosted the 2007 men’s NCAA championships, where Mike Alexandrov broke an American record. Other top meets there include the 2011 winter nationals and the 2011 Duel In the Pool.
“This is a fantastic way to give recognition to Coach McAuley,” Bergmark said. “He was a great coach, a mentor, a generous person, and a Tech alumnus himself. He developed so many swimmers, many of whom I had the great fortune of meeting, competing with, and developing wonderful associations with while at Tech.”
Georgia Tech has slowly risen in the ranks of the Atlantic Coast Conference since Courtney Shealy Hart took over the program in 2009. Behind the performances of the now-graduated Andrew Kosic, the men’s team finished sixth at the ACC championships last February.
More from the Georgia Tech press release:
McAuley did something else that Bergmark has never forgotten, by helping him secure an out-of-state scholarship. “It was his focus on the ‘student’ part of ‘student-athlete’ that I will forever be grateful for, because that is what enabled me to graduate from Tech,” he said.
After graduating, Bergmark achieved success in the petroleum industry. He currently serves as the chief financial officer of Core Laboratories, after having risen through the ranks at Western Atlas International, a leading provider of oilfield services and reservoir information technologies. He has served on the advisory board of the Scheller College of Business and on the board of the Georgia Tech Foundation.
Bergmark’s philanthropic investment guarantees that the McAuley Aquatic Center will remain vital to the Tech campus community, intercollegiate athletics, and the metro Atlanta area. As Bergmark put it, “One of the goals of the gift is to ensure that Georgia Tech will continue to attract the finest events to our world-class venue — this includes not just competitive events but aquatic activities and events for all students as well.”
He hopes, too, that his philanthropy will inspire others, particularly when it comes to Georgia Tech swimming. “What the program needs to complement our coaching talent and quality aquatic facilities are additional endowed scholarships,” he said.
Awesome hope I’m there