The University of California at Santa Barbara has signed on Tim Lewis as their new head coach.

Lewis joins UCSB 20 years of rugby coaching experience, much of it overseas.  With 10 years of coaching abroad, and having garnered two New Zealand Premier Club Championships, he is possibly the most experienced international American-born rugby coach.

Most recently, coach Lewis had the rare opportunity to spend two seasons with the Hawkes Bay Magpies and Tasman Makos, both professional New Zealand teams.

Lewis says UCSB's goal is to develop young men into leaders while creating a player pipeline into the USA Rugby's National Team and USA 7s Olympic team.

By using UCSB's beach front 1st class facilities which includes state of the art weight room with professional lifting coaches, a Pilates instructor, 20,000 seat stadium, five all purpose training fields and 2 Olympic size swimming pools, Lewis will get the daily training environment right while focusing on long term player development. He believes we can build an elite program here at UCSB that feeds into the international team.

Lewis replaces Kevin Battle, who stepped down to concentrate on his job with the DI-A college competition and with his rugby academy affiliated with Santa Barbara City College.