As you might have read on our front page, longtime Ohio swimming and diving coach Greg Werner was “replaced” Wednesday in favor of a second-year assistant coach who was named his interim successor.
Ohio Athletics has failed to offer its reasoning for the decision to fire Werner, who led the team to a second-place finish at last year’s Mid-American Conference Championships and a total of 11 MAC titles in his 18 seasons with the university.
Whether Werner was at fault or Athletics was looking for a new face of the program, Ohio University deserves an explanation.
We know Werner was the subject of an internal evaluation led by Jim Schaus, OU director of athletics, and did not lead the Bobcats for the first meet of the season against Ball State on Saturday because of personal reasons.
We do not know if there was an incident or altercation that led to Werner’s replacement, if his team viewed him unfavorably or if Athletics simply wanted to mix things up.
The first two hypothetical situations are plausible and would definitely be newsworthy, and the final option seems unrealistic — he has been successful by our metrics.
We have reached out to Schaus’ office and Athletics spokesmen, but were met with either voicemail tones or “no comment” messages.
That’s not unusual — public offices rarely comment on personnel matters. But there is no publicly-known justification for Athletics’ action, and our reporters will continue to dig for details on the subject.
Editorials represent the majority opinion of The Post’s executive editors.
