Matt has been in and around competitive swimming for a long time.  He started swimming at age 5 and swam through high school graduation.  He became a swim official at age 19 and officiated high school, college and age group club meets for several years.  Since his daughter began swimming with the Barracudas 8 years ago, he has been a swim parent, a board member/officer, a nationally certified official and now a coach.  He has also been involved with Montana Swimming as Finance Vice Chair and now as General Chair.

Matt wants swimming to be a lifetime activity for our Barracuda athletes and desires for all to learn swimming as a survival skill.  He knows that the competitive swimming community is different than most sports – more collegial, collaborative and familial – and results in life-long friendships.  He gets excited by seeing swimmers attain small successes, at any level of swimming, and the confidence and self-worth that results over time.  Those successes are the result of excellent and efficient technique and hard work.

Coach Lisa has a myriad of experience that elevates the coaching staff at the Bozeman Barracudas.  She began swimming competitively at age 10 with the Canby Gators Swim Club in Canby, OR and quickly rose to become a top-level swimmer in the NW/Western Zone region, specializing primarily in sprints and mid-distance freestyle, backstroke, and butterfly.  She achieved several Junior National times and won numerous events and high point awards throughout her teenage years.  She went on to swim in college at Texas Christian University, a Division I school in the Big 12 conference, which has become well known for their athletic programs.  She also served as the team’s student manager and was able to learn the inner workings of a high level collegiate swim team.

Following graduation from TCU, Coach Lisa obtained her Master’s Degree in Clinical Exercise Physiology from Baylor University.  Her primary professional career has been working in Cardiac Rehabilitation, rehabilitating patients with various cardiovascular diseases.  In addition, her degree coursework included courses on motor development from birth to adulthood, with an emphasis on the development of fundamental skills and their effects on future performance.  This has greatly helped her in understanding proper progression of athletic skill and training capacity to achieve success in sport.

Coach Lisa is now in her eigth year with the Barracudas.  She worked as an assistant the first year, enabling her to work with all ages/groups. As a lead group coach, she first started with our primary Age Group level for one year, then moved up to the Senior group for five years, and is now back with our top Age Group swimmers.  Lisa strives to become a better coach each season than the last, learning from both successes and failures.  She truly enjoys the process of developing not only versatile athletes, but also the skills that help them grow personally and succeed outside the pool.

Janelle was born and raised in Hawaii, where she competed as an age-group swimmer for the Kamehameha Swim Club and PAC-5 high school swim team. Her swimming experiences range from the collegiate pool, to open water, and triathlons. Being a 5'2" woman, she likes to swim smarter and learn to leverage what she's made of. Janelle has teaching experience with Kindergarten through eighth grade students and swim coaching experience at the local, national, and international stages of swimming competition. She believes that swimming is a life-long sport that offers great opportunities to learn skills that will help with life outside of the pool. After living in Maine from April 2019-June 2023, she is happy to be back in Bozeman and coaching for the Barracudas Swim Team again!