Men’s head swimming coach Skip Kenney has been suspended with pay pending an investigation into his decision to delete the names of former athletes from record books, Athletic Director Bob Bowlsby announced Friday afternoon. The legendary coach did not travel with the second-ranked Cardinal men yesterday, when the team headed off to this week’s NCAA Championship meet in Minnesota.

“Coach Kenney readily admits he made bad judgment,” Bowlsby told The Daily. “I think there were punitive intentions. It was an intentional act. I don’t think it can be taken anything but seriously.”

The Daily reported Friday that Kenney intentionally removed the times of five swimmers from the team’s media-guide record books. Several of the swimmers expressed in interviews their belief that the omissions were purposeful and vindictive — an effort to get back at athletes who left the program on bad terms.

The announcement came just days before the most important meet of the season, which begins at the University of Minnesota tomorrow. Associate head coach Ted Knapp will coach the Card unassisted.

“Obviously it is a disruption for them at a critical time of the year,” Bowlsby said. “I didn’t have any control over the timing, and neither did anyone else.”

The athletic director said he found out about the expunged names Wednesday. On Friday afternoon, he met with Knapp and a few of the swimmers on the men’s team.

“I certainly took into account the championship that our young men have trained so hard for,” Bowlsby said. “I took action at the time that the incident occurred. Certainly the timing was less than ideal, but we have to deal with it as it occurs.”

The athletic director, who began his tenure last year, said that while an investigation will begin immediately, much of the process will remain confidential.

“It certainly is not the sort of thing we are going to want to play out in a public way until the time we come to the conclusion of the investigation process,” he said, citing the sensitivity of the issue. “We’ll try to bring it to closure just as quickly as we can.”

When asked if Kenney might leave the University as a result of the investigation, Bowlsby said he “won’t speculate on any outcome.”

The revelation that one of the University’s most prized and well-known coaches would conspire to expunge swimmers’ names from the record books took Bowlsby by surprise.

The times of Jason Plummer ‘92, Richard Eddy ‘06, Michael R. McLean ‘06, Tobias Oriwol ‘06 and Peter Carothers ‘08 all disappeared from the 2007 media guide’s list of Stanford’s all-time top-15 performances. Each swimmer whose name was missing from the guide had his times removed from several different events, meets and years.

While the times all appeared in the 2006 edition of the media guide, they were also stricken from the top times list on the official Stanford Athletics Web site (http://www.gostanford.com).

Kenney has coached the Stanford men’s swimming team since 1979, a run that has included seven NCAA titles as well as a conference-record 26 Pac-10 championships. He coached the United States men’s Olympic swimming team at the 1996 Atlanta games, in which American male swimmers won 15 gold medals.

In an interview with The Daily last Thursday, Kenney initially claimed that the omission had been an honest mistake.

“I think it’s just a mix-up somehow,” he said. “I don’t want to guess as to why.”

But by the afternoon, as other media outlets began picking up on the story, the University released a statement from Kenney, in which the coach apologized for a “serious mistake in judgment.”

“To exclude these five student-athletes from our media guide was an error and it will be corrected immediately,” Kenney said. “I apologize for my actions in this matter.”

Bowlsby also released an official statement Thursday, in which the athletic director denounced the omissions as “unacceptable” and said the University “will immediately restore our records to accurately reflect the history of our men’s swimming program.”

— Additional reporting by James Hohmann.