Swimming Australia appoint former 'Hoogie' mentor Jacco Verhaeren to head coaching position Jacco Verhaeren when he was coach of Inge de Bruijn at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. Swimming Australia has given incoming national head coach Jacco Verhaeren a clear mandate - to make Australia the world's top ranked nation. The announcement of Dutchman Verhaeren as the new national coach was made in Sydney on Thursday at a press conference headed by SA president John Bertrand, chief executive Mark Anderson and director of high performance Michael Scott. The Dutchman is not short of credentials having coached seven Olympic medallists, including 2000 and 2004 gold medallist Pieter van den Hoogenband. Verhaeren, 44, was not present at the announcement. He will move to Australia with his family in mid-January and will initially be based in Queensland. But the coaching veteran of five Olympic Games who has quit his job as the director of Dutch swimming said in a statement: "Australian swimming is extremely well represented on the international stage and to have the chance to work with the athletes and coaches in this role is humbling. In the Netherlands we are a small swimming nation that has worked hard technically to maximise every opportunity. We've had some success working on those technical elements and I hope to bring that focus and drive to this new role in Australia. To have the competitive edge in international swimming you have to combine the physical, physiological and technical components of our sport. And Bertrand, the America's Cup sailing icon who recently joined SA as its president, did not hide how far he and SA expect Verhaeren to take Australian swimming. "Our vision is to be number one in the world in the future, both in the Olympics and Paralympics world, from the Olympic podium right through to grass roots," Bertrand said. That's a huge challenge when we are talking about the best in the world. To achieve that there are four key links typically to get right. One is world class administration. One is world class technology - and technology pervades the whole organisation. [Another link is having] world class individuals - both as athletes and as a team - and finally [having] world class coaching and the coaching of the coaches. Bertrand rated Verhaeren's recruitment as a "coup for this country" and said he "lives and breathes the values that are fundamentally important for any high performance team, and that is our trust and integrity and responsibility in terms of understanding how people interact with each other, and also a wonderful sense of humour which is fundamentally so important to this country in the way people interact."