By Harry Minium
NORFOLK, Va. – She was five years old when her sister got a new swim suit, and when Jessica Miller saw her sister in her new outfit, she immediately wanted one, too.
“My Mom was like, ‘Well, she got a new swim suit because she joined the swim team,’” Jess said. “And she added, ‘You can join the swim team if you’d like.’”
Jess said yes, and in the four decades since, has hardly ever been too far from a pool.
Jess Livsey, as she is now called, has been Old Dominion’s men’s and women’s swim coach for seven seasons, and by every measure, her tenure at ODU has been a success.
Both her men’s and women’s teams have set a high bar for academic achievement, for doing good deeds and for their school spirit, and they do pretty well in the water as well.
With a team stocked with swimmers majoring in health sciences, math and engineering, the women had a composite grade point average of 3.67 and the men a 3.4 in the 2024-25 school year.
Moreover, Zach Redding and Bryce Mortimer were named second-team Scholar All-Americans.
The men’s team led the nation in hours spent doing volunteer work in the community in 2024-25 – that includes feeding the homeless and mentoring or reading to school kids. And this fall, the men set a team record with a 3.52 grade point average.
The swimmers may be the most school spirited of all ODU student-athletes. The men’s swim team dresses up in overalls and cheers in the end zone at football games.
Both the men and women have worn swim suits at volleyball matches and again, cheered in the end zone.
But Jess said perhaps the coolest thing they’ve done is when her girls wore swim suits in the end zone of a football game during a pregame downpour – they were just about the only spectators in the stands at the time as rain poured down on them.
“They sent me a picture in the stands in their swim suits and their caps,” Jess said. “I was like, ‘What are you guys doing?’ They responded, we might as well represent. We can handle getting wet. I thought, good for them. Swimmers, sometimes they just put it out there.”
The Monarchs do their fair share of winning races as well.
Mortimer won the 200 breaststroke in the ASUN swim meet this past weekend while Addison Elliott broke the ODU record in the 100 backstroke. The men’s 800 free relay team of Benjamin Schattenberg, Grey Bremer, Nick Martin and Redding broke a school record.
Redding set the school record in the 100 butterfly and the men’s 200 freestyle relay team of Redding, Jordan Smolsky, Robby Young and Mortimer also broke the school record.
One can hardly imagine a better role model for the 52 young men and women that she coaches.
An ODU alumnus, Jess is a working mother with two young children who, along with assistant coach Elizabeth Ray, is responsible for two teams.
Swimmer Lauren Masters, a junior from Winchester, Virginia who is in ODU’s occupational therapy program, said Jess commands respect because of how much she cares.
“She’s very involved in all of our lives,” she said. “She knows everything about us and is always there for us. She really cares.”
But she added that Jess also demands hard work.
“She has high expectations for all of us.”
Redding, who is in ODU’s nursing program, said Jess “is someone who always has your back and will always rally behind you.
“She is always on your side and by your side giving us positive reinforcement.”
Jess describes herself as an “Army brat” who moved around much of the country as she grew up because her father was in the Army. The family eventually settled in Northern Virginia, where she was a standout swimmer at Lake Braddock High School.
She was recruited to swim at ODU by long-time Coach Carol Withus and was a four-year letter winner before graduating in 2004.
She spent five years coaching at other schools – Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and Davidson College just outside of Charlotte – before returning to ODU as an assistant coach.
When Withus retired in 2019, Jess was named the head coach.
Her daughter, Lorelei, is 10 and son, Matthew, is seven and she is married to David Livseyy, who was a standout swimmer at South Carolina and whose parents both swam at ODU.
Truth be told, Jess says she eventually would have taken the plunge and joined the swim team without a new swim suit.
“I come from a long line of swimmers,” she said. “My grandmother still holds Illinois state records that can never be broken because they changed the pool distance.
“Swimming helped me when I was young and we were moving around the country. There were two places where we knew we could find people, could find new friends, either the youth center or the swim team. So, I always joined the local swim team.”
She was a prodigy who at age 12, was swimming in national meets.
“I was on a national team when I was in high school and traveled the world,” she said. “I got to see some really cool places. It sounds crazy now, but my parents were putting me on a plane when I was like 12 or 13 years old to go swim all over the country.”
Jess had always wanted to become a chef and travel the world on a cruise ship. But as she coached youth teams while in high school, and later while at ODU, she realized, coaching was her calling.
“I got into summer league coaching when I was 15 and just fell in love with the relationships. Carol (Withus) was the driving force for me. She said to put it all down on paper.”
With the help of ODU’s academic advisors, she got certified as a coach, and the rest is history.
Raising two children while coaching two teams “is challenging,” she said.
“But you just have to make it work. We live in Colonial Place, where David grew up, and his Mom is nearby. My parents live in Suffolk. We have a great support group.”
ODU may have one of the nation’s oldest pools used by a university and the Monarchs are fiercely proud of a facility they call “The Scrap.”
The J.C. Scrap Chandler pool is named for the long-time athletic director and swim and track coach at the Norfolk Division of the College of William and Mary, as ODU was known until 1962.
The pool was opened 1970 as part of the now demolished ODU fieldhouse, but has been totally renovated. The plumbing was ripped out, the pool tile replaced along with the sound system, lighting and scoreboard. The locker rooms were recently remodeled and a team meeting added.
“It’s an old pool, but we love it,” Jess said. “It has history. We love swimming here. We’ve been thinking of ways to help raise money and someone mentioned naming rights for our pool. But I was like, we can’t not call it the Scrap.”
Many of her swimmers begin preparations this week for the National Invitation Championship, held in Ocala, Florida from March 12-14. It is akin to basketball’s NIT, and a relatively new event, she said, that gives swimmers who may not quality for the NCAA meet a chance to compete.
“It has created another postseason option to the NCAA meet that has really helped us be able to open the eyes of athletes as to what their options are,” she said. “It has allowed them to set their goals higher. And our teams have really done well. We’ve definitely come a long way. We’re sort of at the tail end of a rebuilding phase for the men and our women, we’re sort of in the middle of rebuilding. We have 26 girls on our team and only four are seniors. But not all of our goals are in the water. Our whole team, they’re all genuine people. They’re here for the right reasons. They really do a great job of achieving so many things that aren’t in the water. Our kids love getting out there in the community and helping people.”
She said she can’t take credit for the success of her swimmers, but then tells a story that shows, indeed, she should receive credit.
“My first semester as a head coach, the men’s GPA was something like a 2.8,” she said. “We were in Florida, on our winter training trip, when the grades came out and I pulled them all aside. I said to them, ‘What are we doing here guys? You are so much better than this.’ Sometimes you just need to be reminded that you do have the ability. Collectively, they decided that they were going to do better. And they really have.”
Minium is ODU's Senior Executive Writer for Athletics. Contact him at hminium@odu.edu or follow him on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram
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