It took a career-ending injury for Frannie Malone to realize her passion for coaching.

Malone, an Iowa alumna, is in her sixth season as assistant coach and recruiting coordinator for Iowa swimming team.

“She’s a tremendous coach,” Iowa head swimming coach Marc Long said. “She makes a great connection with the athletes and provides a lot of enthusiasm.”

Malone, a Peoria, Ill., native, began her collegiate swimming career with the AquaHawks in 1996, breaking away from her family’s Illini roots. While never being a star on the team, she specialized in the backstroke events and competed at the Big Ten championships her freshman year.

But a lingering shoulder injury changed everything her sophomore year.

Malone had shoulder surgery in December 1998 but never quite recovered from the injury — forcing her to give up swimming.

“I think at the time, it seemed like it was the end of the world,” she said. “It’s a really hard process to decide to come to an end. You don’t want to feel like you’re quitting on the team, but at the same time, you have to make the decision that’s best for you.”

Malone stepped away from the pool for a couple of months, until Mary Bolich, the Iowa women’s head coach at the time, encouraged her to rejoin the team as a volunteer student coach.

The move couldn’t have been more natural, and she served as a student coach from 1998 to 2001.

“I realized how much of a part of me [swimming] still was,” she said. “The more and more I was around it, that’s when it really solidified that this was what I wanted to do.”

The Iowa coaching staff suggested she pursue a graduate-assistant job, but Iowa didn’t offer the position. Instead, she moved on, taking a graduate-assistant spot at Ohio University.

At 23, Malone graduated from Ohio with a master’s degree in coaching education and a year of Division-I coaching experience under her belt.

That catapulted her to her first full-time assistant-coach jobs at Fresno State in 2002 and Tulane in 2003.

While at Tulane, she helped rebuild a Green Wave program that hadn’t had a swimming team since the 1989-90 season.

Recalling the rebuilding process at Tulane, she said the coaches didn’t even have offices and used computers in the student academic center.

“We got on the phone and got people excited about this vision we had for our team,” she said. “We ended up being very successful.”

Her efforts in coaching and recruiting helped lead the Green Wave to a Conference USA title in the squad’s second season.

Malone reconnected with her Hawkeye roots in 2004 when she received a phone call from Long, telling her that there was a coaching vacancy at Iowa.

“My dream in coaching was always to come back and coach for the Hawkeyes,” she said.

Malone has enjoyed tremendous success at Iowa, coaching both the men’s and women’s teams. Last season, she coached events that broke four school records.

“She has this quality to see the positives in every situation,” junior swimmer Katarina Tour said. “She’s on you all the time about what you have to do to get better.”

While most assistant coach’s goals are to eventually to take over the reins as a head coach, Malone said she is skeptical.

“It would be hard to replace coaching at Iowa,” she said. “My heart is here and our program is developing so much. There’s going to be a lot of room for growth here.”