Jim Coughlin could smell a brown-noser from a mile away, no matter how prevalent the whiff of chlorine. As a Vallejo police detective, his job was to interview suspects and determine whether they were dangerous criminals, innocent incidentals, or something in between. In doing so, he had come to learn the cues, body language, and instinctual stench of disingenuousness. Now, he suspected, a man purporting to have his daughter’s best interests at heart was feeding him a load of crap, and nothing could have irked him more.
Mike Walker, Jim decided, was full of it, and there was no way he’d consent to entrusting a guy like that with something as important as Natalie’s future.
Walker might have been able to charm most people he encountered, but Jim Coughlin wasn’t one of them. As McKeever’s co–head coach—and Cal’s self-described recruiting specialist—Walker had been the dominant presence during the coaches’ interactions with the family, and Jim understandably wondered whether McKeever was a mere figurehead. On a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 1999, during lunch at a Berkeley café called Julie’s, Jim made a point of asking McKeever a direct question, and when she opened her mouth to answer, Walker cut her off and provided the response. This happened a second time, and upon hearing Walker’s reply, Coughlin felt he was being conned. Every time Coughlin would make a point or express an opinion, Walker would enthusiastically agree.
An hour later, as the group sat together in Memorial Stadium during a Cal football game, Jim finally snapped, telling Walker, “Why don’t you stop kissing my ass for a second and tell me what you really think, instead of what you think I want to hear?” It was an uncomfortable moment for everyone, especially McKeever, whose self-esteem was somewhere at the bottom of Spieker Pool.
McKeever was at a crisis point, personally and professionally, when she entered the recruiting derby for the young woman who would ultimately facilitate her dramatic coaching breakthrough. Something about Coughlin—the degree to which she’d been wounded by her experience with the Terrapins, the mature manner in which she carried herself—told McKeever they belonged together. Similarly, Coughlin had an almost intuitive feeling that this socially awkward yet well-meaning woman was exactly the person she needed to rekindle her enthusiasm for swimming. Had the two of them been left to their own devices, they would have sealed the deal and commenced the mutual healing process. But the presence of a slick co–head coach, a distrusting father, and a worried mother made this a tricky proposition.
“When we dealt with Cal, Mike Walker did most of the talking,” Jim Coughlin recalls. “We didn’t really get to know Teri at all. He was the reason I didn’t feel comfortable about Berkeley. My attitude was ‘I am not turning our daughter over to him.’ ”
McKeever knew none of this at the time. By her estimation, she was more anxious talking to Natalie than the teenage recruit was talking to her. But even before Coughlin told her later that fall that she wanted to come to Cal—and before having to sweat out the next 6 weeks as Natalie and her parents clashed over whether she would actually sign a letter of intent—McKeever had gained something from the process.
That day at Julie’s, as Walker cut her off and talked right over her before she could answer Jim Coughlin, McKeever finally made a decision that had been more than a year in the works: to stand up to Walker and have the courage to become the coach she’d always wanted to be. Watching the entitled look on her cocoach’s face as he stepped on her yet again, McKeever very nearly lost control. She almost started screaming at him, then thought better of it. Instead, she glared at Walker with a look that said, You will never do this to me again.
Parting ways with Walker wasn’t so simple, however. His big personality, dripping with charisma and bravado, activated McKeever’s fears about everything she wasn’t. She was introverted and awkward around crowds; Walker was popular and funny. Yet she also regarded him as passive-aggressive, a man who knew exactly how to push her buttons, usually when she felt the most vulnerable. In McKeever’s words, “As Mike got bigger, I got smaller.”
McKeever had come to Cal in 1992, during a down period for a program that had finished as high as fourth nationally—a total of seven times in 14 years—under Karen Moe Thornton. McKeever’s first Cal team finished 15th at the ’93 NCAAs, then sank as low as 28th 2 years later. Walker, at the time he came aboard as an assistant in 1995, had been an ambitious 26-year-old who, like McKeever, had set his sights much higher than reentering the top 20. McKeever was aware that her coaching ability was viewed as suspect by some—“A lot of people thought I only got hired because I was a woman, that I’d never get it done at Cal,” she says—and made it her mission to prove them wrong. “When I get us into the top 10,” McKeever used to say to Walker, “I’m gonna tell everyone to (screw) off, and then I’m gonna leave.”
But the Bears finished ninth in 1997 and fifth in ’99, the first time any program had gone from being unranked to finishing in the top five in 6 short years—and McKeever stuck around. Walker grew frustrated, and in an effort to placate him, McKeever agreed to make him the co–head coach (a nominal designation of equality, if not an entirely accurate one) in May 1997. That confirmed the suspicions of many outsiders who believed Walker was the true architect behind the Bears’ revival. In her more vulnerable moments, McKeever wondered, too: Despite her prior success at Fresno State, she would occasionally question whether her unconventional coaching philosophy could succeed at an upper-echelon program without Walker’s more traditional techniques to augment it. That was what stopped her from initiating a breakup on the spot as he kept her from answering Jim Coughlin’s questions.
“I was personally afraid that without him, it would all fall apart,” McKeever says. “My self-esteem was so low, I believed that I couldn’t be me and be successful. Mike wanted to control every piece of the operation, and what had once been a good situation evolved into something dark and ugly.”
Low self-esteem wasn’t McKeever’s only issue. She was suffering from panic and anxiety attacks, as well as depression. She was, in her words, “pretty much of a mess.”
A few months earlier, McKeever had turned to Kathie Wickstrand. The two had been friends since early in McKeever’s tenure at Cal, when one day she picked up her office phone and, out of the blue, dialed Wickstrand’s number. Though the two had been acquainted only casually to that point, what followed was, in Wickstrand’s words, “a really powerful conversation” that ended with a proposition. “I’m part of this international organization that does these experimental workshops for women, designed to empower us,” Wickstrand told McKeever. “We’re having one a few weekends from now in Lake Delevan, Wisconsin. Why don’t you come out?”
There was a short pause before McKeever answered, “Okay.” She got on a plane, bonded with Wickstrand, and began a long journey toward self-realization.
Five years later, McKeever became the first person to hire Wickstrand, who later took the married name Wickstrand-Gahen, as a life coach. Her major professional issue was her strained relationship with Walker, but she learned a valuable lesson in the process. “If you have stress and anxiety in your life,” McKeever says now, “don’t blame other people—work on yourself. This is the message, after all, that I’m trying to give to my athletes.”
Wickstrand-Gahen’s initial strategy was to try to repair McKeever’s relationship with Walker—she met with the two individually and together and tried to improve the dynamic before ultimately viewing it as irrevocably fractured. “I basically just loved her for like a year,” Wickstrand-Gahen says. “It took her about 2 years to get the courage and strength to get rid of him. She had given him too much power.”
McKeever’s friend Dave Salo, whose Irvine Novaquatics club is one of the nation’s most successful, concedes that “Teri was scared to hell at the prospect of getting Natalie. Her confidence wasn’t there, and that’s partly because of the way the situation was up there. Mike Walker had a way of manipulating Teri, of preying on her lack of confidence. He’s the same way as a recruiter. He finds that weakness and uses it to get you to like him.”
That was the idea, at least. Even after that uncomfortable exchange with Jim Coughlin at the stadium, even as Coughlin dug in with all his might to prevent his daughter from swimming at Cal, the co–head coach kept telling McKeever he had the family sold.
In October, Natalie called McKeever and told her, “I’m coming to Cal.” But McKeever could hardly celebrate, as there were still 6 weeks until national signing day. Those would turn out to be the longest 6 weeks of McKeever’s career. It got to the point where the coach was hesitant to call the Coughlin household; she instinctively sensed that Jim and Zennie were not on her side. Instead, she called Ray Mitchell to pick his brain. Sure enough, the Terrapins coach confirmed her suspicions that Coughlin’s parents had serious reservations about Natalie’s coming to Cal and were trying to change her mind. Then, referring to Walker, Mitchell told her, “The dad wants to know which one of you is calling the shots.”
That’s it, McKeever thought to herself. Whether Natalie comes here or not, something has to change.
Nearly 4 years later, on a Saturday evening in late September, Coughlin is practically skipping up Berkeley’s fantastic Telegraph Avenue with a group of teammates and several wide-eyed recruits in tow. “SC Sucks!” Coughlin jubilantly screams to each group of red-and-gold-clad visitors she encounters. The Golden Bears have just pulled off the biggest upset of the 2003 college football season, a 34–31 victory over the eventual national champion University of Southern California Trojans in triple overtime, and one of the greatest athletes in the university’s esteemed history is, like thousands of other students in her midst, enjoying the hell out of being a rowdy college kid.
“It’s gonna be a lo-o-o-ng trip home!” Coughlin informs any SC fan within earshot. “Hope you had a pleasant stay.”
The high school swimmers tagging along can scarcely believe what they’re hearing. Some recruits on official visits have been so timid around Coughlin that they were barely able to speak; others have asked for her autograph. These girls are grateful to see this superstar swimmer acting, well, human.
As meticulously planned as McKeever’s recruiting weekends are, this kind of spontaneous revelry is totally off the script. It’s a big weekend, too—one of the recruits, Southern California backstroker Diana MacManus, is a major talent who McKeever believes could help ease the pain of Coughlin’s departure. The other five visitors, especially backstroker/sprint freestyler Brooke Bishop, have plenty of potential as well. Inevitably, when Coughlin is not around, each recruit puts the same question to the other Cal swimmers: Does Natalie get special treatment?
“No, not at all,” they reply—although most of them believe that actually she does.
Yet there is no denying Coughlin’s star power—and, as a bonus, most recruits leave Berkeley surprised by how down-to-earth she is. But the chance to rub elbows with a future Olympian isn’t the only thing going for Cal. McKeever highlights the university’s esteemed academic reputation, noting that UC Berkeley is the nation’s top-ranked public school (in 2004, the Times (London) would rank it second in the world, behind only Harvard). She extols the virtues of a vibrant, diverse campus that’s just across the bay from San Francisco. Most of all, she presents a team that is close-knit and united in its dual-edged purpose—to push the program to even greater heights while enjoying the journey.
If nothing else, recruits who visit Cal are sure to be blown away by the precisely planned weekends. Once sheepish about her natural inclination to organize and map out itineraries—these were traditionally thought to be skills better handled by an assistant coach—McKeever, in the years since Walker’s departure, learned to embrace these strengths. Her attention to detail sets her apart from most of her peers.
Each Cal swimmer has a key responsibility toward ensuring that the recruiting weekend is a success. In an e-mail to the team that October, McKeever included a comprehensive schedule for the upcoming weekend’s visitors, one of whom potentially was a huge prize: Seattle-area sprint freestyler Emily Silver, whose older sister, Helen, was a standout sophomore backstroker for the Bears. In theory, signing Emily should have been a slam dunk, but the situation was more complicated than it appeared. For one thing, though Helen had been a typical McKeever late bloomer, exceeding all projections with an impressive freshman campaign, she had also drawn her coach’s ire at times. Plus, McKeever had to consider the possibility that her fervent wooing of Emily might rankle Helen. Emily, at least in theory, had a chance to be even more of a star than her older sister; would this cause tension in the family, or, more important, could it disrupt the team dynamic?
In any event, with Emily and four other swimmers—Anna Miller, Caitlyn Short, Emily Verdin, and Sherry Tsai—set to arrive the following Thursday afternoon, McKeever was determined to provide a weekend packed with activities and information. The itinerary was painstakingly meticulous, basically accounting for each recruit’s whereabouts at all times. Some highlights:
Thursday, October 23, 2003
4:45 p.m. Whitney picks up 15-passenger van at Enterprise.
5:30 p.m. Teri w/Nat C. and Micha to check in and decorate at Doubletree Berkeley Marina.
9:40 p.m. Caitlyn arrives on Southwest #2336 from Portland—Teri picks up.
10:08 p.m. Anna arrives on United #481 from Knoxville (Chicago)—Teri picks up.
10:41 p.m. Emily Silver arrives on Southwest #476 from Seattle—Whitney picks up.
11:30 p.m. Emily Verdin arrives on JetBlue #319 from Washington/Dulles—Whitney picks up. Caitlyn Short with Anna Miller; Emily Silver with Emily Verdin.
Friday, October 24, 2003
7:00 a.m. Rise and shine, get ready for a great day.
7:45 a.m. Whitney picks up all four recruits at Doubletree for breakfast; will leave bags in van.
8:00 a.m. Breakfast at New Dining Commons with Teri, Whitney, freshmen, plus Lisa, Amy, Kate, Helen.
8:50 a.m. (Anna Miller/Emily Silver) Depart with Whitney and Kelly for meeting w/Professor Sanchez at Barrows.
8:50 a.m. (Emily Verdin) Walks back to office to meet with Teri.
8:50 a.m. (Caitlyn Short) Annie/Catherine meets at DC to walk to business class at Wheeler.
12:00 noon (Emily Silver) Annie walks from class at Mulford to lunch at Bear’s Lair.
12:05 p.m. Lunch for everyone that does not have class at Bear’s Lair. Amy and Lisa will buy sandwiches at Cheese ’n’ Stuff (10 sandwiches/chips/drinks). Plan to stay until 1 p.m. or until Whitney arrives.
3:30 p.m. Time to return to hostess or they can go for a swim: Anna w/Lisa and Emma; Caitlyn w/Kelly; Em Silver w/Erin and Catherine; Em Verdin w/Lauren and Amy.
6:30 p.m. Pizza party and dinner at Teri’s.
7:30 p.m. Trip to the City for ice cream, etc. (Gina, Ashley, Marcelle, Helen, Cheryl, Kelly).
And so it went, from the Cal football game against Arizona on Saturday afternoon through that night’s plans, with seven swimmers designated as “social” hostesses and one in charge of any recruits who might prefer “quiet” time. Beginning at 5 a.m. Sunday, McKeever would make the first of three separate trips to the Oakland airport and accompany each recruit to the security line.
As far as Emily Silver and her parents could tell, McKeever seemed genuinely interested in offering her at least a partial scholarship. At the time, they had no idea how badly the coach wanted her to come to Cal. “This girl is good,” McKeever said shortly after Emily’s visit concluded. “But if we can get her here, she has a chance to become really good. I just hope she enjoyed herself, because I would love to coach her.”
Coughlin remembers when she was the one being wooed. It felt strange to be so wanted, because her shoulder injury had sapped both her confidence and her love for the sport. Beaten down by her battles with Ray Mitchell, she saw swimming merely as a vehicle to get her to the college of her choice. Maybe she’d stay with the team for a year or two; perhaps, if things didn’t improve, she’d take the money and run. At that point, she didn’t trust many people, so she didn’t know what to make of the excitement that her visits to Cal, Stanford, and UCLA were generating among the coaches in question.
Despite the fragility of her shoulder, Coughlin had been regarded as a prize recruit. Her uncanny versatility and short-course excellence made her highly desirable. “Even if she were to swim the same times she was swimming with the bad shoulder and not improve, she’d have been one of the nation’s top three swimmers in everything,” McKeever says. “Plus, getting a swimmer that talented would give credibility to the program.”
Coughlin knew two things: She wanted to go to school in California, and she wanted to swim for someone as dissimilar to Mitchell as possible. She took a trip to UCLA and liked coach Cyndi Gallagher, but she didn’t feel as though she fit in well with the team. That left Cal and Stanford, the two Bay Area rivals and academic giants. Whereas the Bears were in the process of reemerging as a legitimate national player, the Cardinal boasted the preeminent women’s program in the country.
Stanford’s coach, Richard Quick, was the biggest name in the business. In 1998 he had won his sixth NCAA title in 7 years, and seventh overall since he’d come to Palo Alto a decade earlier. He had taken the Stanford job immediately after having won five consecutive national championships at Texas. From the time he’d taken the Texas job in 1982, he would complete an incredible 2-decade stretch in which each of his teams would finish in the top three.
While recruiting Coughlin, Quick had already been selected as the US women’s head coach for the 2000 Olympics, the third time he’d received that honor since the Seoul Games in 1988. He had also beem the men’s head coach in Seoul and an assistant in ’84 and ’92. Recruiting wasn’t difficult for this hyperintense 56-year-old—he simply went after the biggest names in swimming (Jenny Thompson, Janet Evans, Summer Sanders) and got most of them, filling out his roster with a stable of high school all-Americans and former national champions.
Quick wanted Coughlin and figured he’d get her. Unlike McKeever, he was a man who lived, ate, and breathed swimming and wasn’t particularly concerned with the nooks and crannies of a successful recruiting weekend. When Natalie visited Stanford, Jim Coughlin recalls, “Richard’s attitude was ‘What you see is what you get. I am the best; this is the best place to swim; this is the best school.’ Whereas Teri looked at the entire person and tried to give them an idea of what it would be like to be living at Cal and attending school there, Richard didn’t bother with specifics. He’d say, ‘This is a great campus. People make a lot of money who go here. We are the best.’ But when it came to how she’d spend her time on the visit, Richard didn’t have a plan.”
Among the other reasons Coughlin blanched at signing with Stanford: She was tired of being told what to do, and she had a natural affinity for the underdog. Quick, she knew, would push her, and he would favor a more traditional approach to training. That’s not to say that he was an old-school thinker; he was more like an old-world faith healer, constantly searching for the miracle potion or training technique.
Coughlin was fond of Quick and respected his coaching ability immensely. But his intensity made her uncomfortable, and it certainly worked to McKeever’s advantage that she was a comparatively non-aggressive woman. “It’s like the superstrict parents who won’t let you go out—their kids turn out to be the most rebellious,” Coughlin explains. “Teri is easygoing and honest and trusts her swimmers to prepare themselves, rather than having to micromanage their behavior. That’s why I work so well for her.”
“Natalie liked Richard,” Jim Coughlin says. “But she had come from a male coach who acted like, ‘Whatever I say is right, and whatever you have to say, keep it to yourself.’ Teri is someone who, as she coaches you, wants to hear your opinion. She might try to get you to change it, but she still wants to hear your perspective.”
That was the backdrop under which Coughlin evaluated her choices and, with conviction, decided to go to Cal. She called McKeever to give her the news, then told her parents—and that’s when the fireworks began. During the 6 weeks between the phone call and the day she could officially sign her letter of intent, Coughlin’s parents argued stridently that she was making the wrong choice. Part of Jim’s opposition, to be sure, was his distaste for Mike Walker, but there were other forces at work.
“Both Jim and I got our 4-year degrees long after we had started working, so neither of us had experienced a classic college experience,” Zennie says. “Natalie would tell us, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and I guess in a sense we didn’t. We did look at the financial aspects of it and think that Stanford was a better deal. At Cal, you’re on your own after the first year in terms of housing, whereas at Stanford you can stay in the dorms. I was thinking, ‘My poor daughter is going to have to cook for herself’—which is funny now, because she cooks gourmet meals all the time. But that whole college selection process was so stressful. She hated us.”
Says Jim: “Oh, God, she hated us. That whole situation was really ugly, and it took about 2 years for us to live it down. As a parent, you always want the best for your daughter, and Cal’s dorms certainly weren’t the best—plus, you’d be on your own after your freshman year.”
None of this resonated with Natalie, who became enraged when her parents took the financial argument to its next conclusion: Stanford, a top-of-the-line private school, cost far more to attend than Cal, a first-rate public university that was a comparative bargain for California residents. Thus, the Coughlins reasoned, a full scholarship to Stanford was worth far more than a full ride to Cal. “That’s crazy!” Natalie shrieked. “A full ride is a full ride, and Cal is a better school!”
McKeever was mostly oblivious to the conflict that was going on. She had her own issues—the impending professional breakup with Walker; coaching a senior-heavy team that 6 months later would produce a fourth-place finish at the NCAAs, the school’s best in 9 years; and anxiety and depression that had reached a crisis point.
“It was, on paper, the high point of my coaching career,” McKeever says, “and it was one of the lowest points in my life. We had finished fifth in ’99 and came in fourth in 2000. We had Marylyn Chiang, who was the Pac-10 Swimmer of the Year; we had Elli Overton, a three-time Olympian, and a bunch of other swimmers (Joscelin Yeo, Waen Minpraphal, Staciana Stitts) who ended up making the 2000 Olympic team. Yet I made the mistake of letting somebody tell me I was a bad coach—and then actually believing him.
“I really, honestly believe it was my turning point in life. Only in the last couple of years have I finally been able to look in the mirror and really like the person I see. So if you look at it that way, I’m glad I went through it, because I would not be who I am today if I hadn’t.”
When McKeever told Walker she wanted to break up the partnership, they agreed that their public spin would be that he wanted to seek a head-coaching opportunity. The irony was that Walker suggested to McKeever that she delay an announcement because “I think I can get Natalie. If she knows I’m leaving, you might lose her.” Mistaken as Walker’s premise may have been, many coaches might have been tempted to follow his recommendation with so much on the line. Not McKeever. “If we lose her, we lose her,” McKeever told him. “I’m not going to misrepresent my program just to get her here; then, when she finds out you were leaving the whole time, what’s she gonna think?”
It was the right call for several reasons, and not at all a surprising one to the people who know McKeever best. “Teri is someone who follows the rules to a T,” Kathie Wickstrand-Gahen says. “There’s a right way to do things and a wrong way, period. She’s someone who’s never going to jaywalk. Natalie, incidentally, is the same way.”
When it comes to wooing athletes, McKeever makes a point of playing up her program’s virtues without degrading the competition. “Teri simply won’t engage in negative recruiting, and I think it hurts her,” sophomore breaststroker Gina Merlone said in October 2003. “The thing is, every other coach is out there doing it to her, and we all wish she’d fight back, but she’s just not that kind of person. So we probably end up losing out on a lot of talented athletes.”
It’s not as if McKeever doesn’t know that some of her foes out there are bad-mouthing her: Even after Coughlin signed with Cal, McKeever assumed the skeptics were giving it an insidious spin: “I’m sure there were people who thought, ‘She went there because it’s not as serious as Stanford. She picked that because her swimming isn’t as important to her anymore.’ ”
Of course, Coughlin knew exactly what she was doing. Many people close to her believe that had she gone to Stanford, the scarred swimmer would have quit by Christmas of her freshman year—not because Quick’s program isn’t exceptional but because it wouldn’t have allowed her to rediscover her love for the sport. “The truth is, she didn’t care that much about how good a coach I was,” McKeever insists. “She wanted to be in an environment where she was going to be respected, where she could have a voice, and that was the most important piece for her. And I’ll bet I turned out to be a better coach than she expected.”
It’s just before midnight on a cloudy Sunday night in early October, 2003, and McKeever, the 2002 American Swimming Coaches Association Coach of the Year, is putting the final touches on the upcoming weekend’s recruiting itinerary. “Who else is gonna do it?” McKeever asks rhetorically. While many of the nation’s top swimming programs have a secretary or an administrator assigned to such tasks, McKeever serves as her own executive assistant.
“I can tell it’s October,” she muses, “because I’ve had four breakdowns in the last few days.” She’s referring not to her own emotional ebbs but those of four of her swimmers. “Two are breaking up with their boyfriends—and one has two boyfriends. And yesterday I kicked a girl out of practice, and now she’s disappeared on me. She said, ‘I’m not feeling well.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I don’t feel good, either.’ I didn’t take enough psychology classes for this.”
The next afternoon McKeever, a tall woman with curly dirty-blond hair, has bags under her eyes and looks like she could use about three espresso shots. She’s sitting in the same chair in the same office in which she spent much of the previous night. “Are you okay?” asks Coughlin, who has been telling her coach about the condominium she’s about to purchase in nearby Emeryville, a couple of blocks from the eastern edge of San Francisco Bay. “You look tired.”
“I am tired,” McKeever says. “I know you are, too.”
As thrilled as she is to have Coughlin back for another season, McKeever has also paid a price for the swimmer’s decision to remain an amateur. With Coughlin not allowed to hire an agent, McKeever dutifully fills the role, doing everything from setting up magazine photo shoots to handling travel plans for award-presentation dinners.
In the meantime, she’s trying to get some big-time recruits in the fold to keep her program humming. And it seems one of them, Diana MacManus, has a little history with Haley Cope, the unlikely former Cal star who is still in Berkeley, training with McKeever in an attempt to make the 2004 Olympic team. MacManus, who as a 14-year-old in 2000 came scarily close to making the US Olympic team in the 100-meter backstroke, captured both the 100 and 200 back at the ’02 US Nationals, the former race at the expense of the second-place Cope.
Coughlin, a good friend of Cope’s, once laughed as she recounted the infamous incident: “So they’re up there on the medal stand, and Diana reaches down and smiles and shakes Haley’s hand. And Haley glares at her and says, as they’re getting the medals, ‘Let’s see how tough you are when we’re in a dark alley.’ It was like, Whoa. But that’s Haley—if you know her, you understand.”