Founder Matt Finnigan grew up in the swimming hotbed of Northern California's Bay Area. Swimming competitively for nearly 18 years for clubs straddling the Bay Area's peninsula, Matt's most notable tutelage in the sport came under the direction of the late Kevin Perry, whom he competed for six years at the Los Altos Aquatic Club. "Swimming for Kevin Perry, I learned more than just about swimming," Finnigan recalls. "I learned about life. 'KP' had a way of drawing every ounce of talent out of every one of his athletes, all the while teaching them life lessons about hard work, dedication, effective communication, learning to work together, and striving for excellence no matter who you were or what you were going to do with your life. I think I learned more from KP than I learned from any of my high school teachers. That's just who he was. He wasn't just a swim coach, he was a life teacher."
Matt tends to bring this same style of coaching to his daily regimen of training. The wealth of high intensity training that Race Swami administers, is a training style borrowed from the philosophies of many of the Bay Area's most successful swim programs over the decades. Matt has blended his swimming talents with his love for entrepreneurship to form Race Swami,founded in 2011. Before his years in coaching, Matt played a vital role in building a number of Silicon Valley start-up brands.
Matt followed that career up by coaching for eight seasons at Judge Memorial Catholic High School, where the girls’ swimming program amassed six state titles, along with two 2nd place finishes. Matt has been awarded Utah Swimming Coach of the Year twice (2017, 2018) and was a featured speaker at USA Swimming’s #SwimBiz Conference in 2019. Aside from the mentorship he received under Kevin Perry, Matt also served valuable time with Bay Area-based coaches Travis Wyckoff, Ed Samuels, and the late John Felix. In recent years Matt spent time in the Florida Keys seeking advice and ideas from Gary Hall Sr. whom he tabs as one of swimming's most knowledgeable coaches in the profession.