On a frigid New Jersey morning in early December, seven young women lay in a cramped hotel room, only one of them sleeping—and another sobbing in the predawn darkness. The sleeping swimmer, Cal junior Lisa Morelli, was catching a couple of hours of shut-eye before the Bears’ early-morning flight back to San Francisco—and simultaneously preventing anyone else from doing so. Morelli was snoring, loudly, while the others—Micha Burden and Marcelle Miller in one double bed, Coughlin next to Morelli in the other, Flora Kong and Keiko Amano on the floor, and Emma Palsson in the bathtub—stirred restlessly amid the unrelenting buzz saw.
Shivering under the thin blanket she shared with Morelli, Coughlin was in desperate need of sleep. After Cal’s wildly successful performance at the Princeton University Invitational, she and the rest of the Bears had piled into vans and taken a trip through driving snow to New York City, where they’d checked out the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, had dessert in the restaurant popularized by the film Serendipity, and cruised Times Square. Now, at 2:30 a.m., they were finally back at the hotel, only 2 hours from the dreaded predawn wake-up call, and Coughlin could feel a cold coming on—her throat was sore, her sinuses throbbed, her heart raced, and now tears stung her swollen eyes.
Coughlin hadn’t been right since Barcelona. Over the past 5 months her immune system, normally impenetrable, had been compromised by a variety of colds and viruses, and she felt generally sluggish. Coughlin had yet to have what she considered a top-quality workout since she’d returned from the World Championships, and until the past couple of days, she had struggled to approach her typical form in races. Even worse, other than from Teri McKeever, she wasn’t receiving much sympathy at the pool. The rest of the Bears saw a tired swimmer who skipped occasional sets and missed practices and spin and weight sessions whenever she felt under the weather. Yeah, like I’m not sick, some would think to themselves as they gutted out another workout with depleted, sleep-deprived bodies of their own.
As important as Coughlin was to the team’s success, some of her teammates resented her—which said as much about the culture as it did them. The swimming world is so grounded in the tenet that longer, harder workouts lead to faster times that any perceived shortcut is frowned upon, especially by those doing the bulk of the suffering. Yet when word spread of Coughlin’s mini-breakdown in the snore-infested hotel room, even some of Coughlin’s close friends on the team had trouble relating.
The reality was, no one else on the roster could truly understand the pressure-packed existence she experienced on a daily basis. In 8 months Coughlin’s entire athletic career, and possibly her financial future, would be decided by her performance in one meet.
Though amiable and deeply committed to the program, Coughlin, because of her immense talent and notoriety, had never really been “one of the girls,” and now she was truly living a separate existence. She had just moved out of her North Berkeley apartment and into the condominium she had purchased in nearby Emeryville, using “medal money” from past national and international meets that she’d been allowed to pocket while retaining her amateur status. She was being wooed by agents, doing interviews and photo shoots for national publications, getting intermittently tailed by an NBC television crew, and speaking at university functions. Through all of this, the psychology major maintained her 3.5 grade point average while taking her heaviest course load at one of the toughest academic institutions in the country.
Every decision Coughlin made carried overtones that escaped most of those around her. Many college swimmers, including some of Cal’s, partied heavily when no major competition loomed. Coughlin, by contrast, wouldn’t even take vitamins or sip an “immunity boost” at Jamba Juice, fearing the hidden ingredients could lead to a positive drug test. Each lap she took at practice was viewed within two contexts: how it would help her prepare for the collegiate meets and how it would affect her Olympic prospects. Some Bears questioned Coughlin’s dedication, but hers was a focus to which they could not relate.
To McKeever, such carping was blasphemy. She remembered experiencing a similar sensation when Staciana Stitts came home from Sydney with a gold medal and what the swimmer called “post-Olympic depression.” McKeever had told the team then to be forgiving of Stitts, asking, “Do you know what it must feel like every time you get up to swim to have someone say, ‘She’s an Olympic champion’? Even if it’s not in your best event, you’re still an Olympic champion, so the expectation level is there. You don’t have the luxury of not being at your best, ever.”
With Coughlin, McKeever felt, it was degrees worse: “She is on an island. She has to be at her best at all times, in and out of the pool. She has the responsibility of being asked to help carry her sport in the United States.” Thus, the coach had little patience for Coughlin’s internal critics. “If these people understood how much she’s done for this program and for this university, they’d kiss her feet,” the coach had said while eating a frozen yogurt on a Durant Avenue bench the afternoon before the team left Princeton. “What they don’t realize is the emotional responsibility of being Natalie Coughlin. When they’re older, they’ll look back and realize what a privilege it was to have been on a team with her, and they’ll view these issues much differently.”
And yet, despite the building tension within the team fabric, the Bears had surprised themselves and their coaches with an astonishing performance at Princeton, a meet that changed an entire team’s perception of where it belonged and what it might accomplish. The Bears had cruised to lopsided victories in all four of their early season dual meets against overmatched teams, yet there was a general lethargy to their efforts that had McKeever and Hite questioning their own coaching approach. The Princeton meet, which Cal figured to win, would at least provide some tougher competition; it was also the last time the Bears would compete against anyone for another 7 weeks, until the opening of the brief Pac-10 dual-meet season against powerful Arizona in Berkeley.
Often, with a break like that looming—one that in this case would include a winter training trip to Australia—coaches push their swimmers in practice and try to keep them in shape for the season’s pivotal stretch. But McKeever and Hite were so frustrated and flummoxed by what they’d been seeing that they made a tactical decision: They would ease up in practice and give the Bears some rest before Princeton, a move they hoped would lead to improved times. That, in turn, would give the swimmers some much-needed confidence.
The two coaches had no idea how much their ploy would pay off.
“When I got to Berkeley in July, things had been miserable, and I hadn’t seen enough in those 5 months to convince me things would get that much better,” Hite says. “But Princeton showed us how good we could be. That was the single most important meet I’ve ever experienced.”
That’s a pretty heavy statement from someone who won three national championships as a Georgia assistant coach and another as a Texas swimmer. Yet that’s how transformational the Princeton meet was. It was as if the Bears, suddenly, were a different team.
Coughlin, despite her various physical maladies, won the 100- and 200-yard backstrokes and the 200-yard individual medley, an event that triggered memories of her former life as a teenage phenom. The 200 IM was the event in which she’d finished fourth at the 2000 Trials, and the time she recorded at Princeton (1:55.46) was a personal best. She had all but abandoned the event since she’d come to Cal, yet McKeever had designs on her swimming it at the Pac-10 Championships, where USC’s Kaitlin Sandeno, a former and future Olympian, would provide some intriguing competition.
More significant was Coughlin’s presence on Cal’s 800-yard freestyle relay, an event she didn’t figure to swim at the NCAA Championships because her anticipated schedule (she had won the 100 back, 200 back, and 100 fly in each of the past three NCAA meets and had swum on four relays) wasn’t particularly suited to adding another 200 free on the meet’s second night. Yet in Princeton, Coughlin led off a relay that included breakout freshman Erin Reilly, senior Micha Burden, and junior Lauren Medina, and they proceeded to set a school record with a time of 7:09.37.
When Hite saw the time, he suspected a scoreboard malfunction. He and McKeever later went online and began comparing it with other times around the country; it was the best in the nation to that point, by far. “No one else was within 5 seconds,” Hite recalls. “We started saying, ‘Hey, we could win this event at NCAAs.’ ” The statement was significant because of recent history. Whereas the balance of swimming power had once resided in the Pac-10—usually with Richard Quick’s Stanford juggernaut—it had shifted in recent years to the SEC, where Georgia and Auburn had developed powerhouse programs. So thorough was those two schools’ dominance that in the previous three NCAA meets, they had combined to win all 15 relays. Breaking up that dual dynasty, even in a single relay, would be a momentous accomplishment—and to do it, the Bears would need their best swimmer onboard. So Hite launched a lobbying effort that would persist all the way to March.
The most memorable swim of the Princeton meet, however, was provided by Cal’s other Natalie—senior cocaptain Natalie Griffith. That she was swimming at all was a minor miracle: Three months earlier she had sat in McKeever’s office and told her coach she was quitting.
McKeever wasn’t totally shocked: Griffith, though a valuable contributor to the team’s success in each of her three seasons, had thus far had a career defined more by what she hadn’t accomplished than by what she had. Not only was she constantly overshadowed by her luminous namesake, but this Natalie, whom teammates called “Nut” to avoid confusion, was haunted by her illustrious past. While not quite as decorated a high school swimmer as Coughlin—hell, who was?—Griffith had been a big-time recruit when she accepted a full ride to Cal. The Newport News, Virginia, native had qualified for nine events at US Nationals while still in high school and, with her versatility and aptitude for the rigorous butterfly, seemed perfectly suited to collegiate swimming stardom.
But Griffith, it turned out, was that rare swimmer whom McKeever couldn’t push to greater heights. Griffith had had a decent freshman season and then leveled off, and her enthusiasm for the sport waned to the point where her ascendancy to the captain’s position—by a vote of her teammates, who also picked outgoing junior Amy Ng—was viewed by some swimmers as a nod more to her longevity than to her motivational impact. So when Griffith told McKeever in September, “I can’t do it anymore,” the coach was understanding. “Look, let’s not b.s. each other,” McKeever said. “The fact is that you need me, and I need you. So let’s try to figure out a way to make it work.”
What McKeever meant was that Griffith, as an out-of-state resident on a full scholarship, was taking up a hefty share of the Bears’ money pool. Already underfunded—the NCAA allowed 14 scholarships for women’s swimming and diving; Cal had only enough capital to offer 11—McKeever could ill afford a hit like the one she was about to suffer. With 11 scholarships, many of which were split between two or more swimmers, McKeever knew her mistakes were costly. Defections, on the other hand, were downright deadly. Were Griffith to leave the team, McKeever could take away her scholarship, but that would hurt both of them—for McKeever, there was no one with whom to replace Griffith this year; for Griffith, a year of out-of-state tuition while completing her degree would run about $20,000.
So McKeever’s immediate response was to figure out a way to keep Griffith in the fold. “Let’s not look at ‘how do we get to March,’ ” McKeever told her. “Let’s look at ‘how do we get to November.’ ” If Griffith’s motivational malaise seemed like a daunting force, McKeever’s inclination was to attack the problem by breaking it into smaller, more manageable issues. For example, Griffith had signed up for an afternoon class and consistently missed practices to attend it, instead making up the lost time with individual workouts. “How about this?” McKeever suggested. “I won’t question it if you miss those practices altogether. But when you are here, you have to be engaged in the process. If you’re going to be a captain, I need you to be focused when you’re at the pool.”
An agreement was forged, yet there was no epiphany. Over the next few months, Griffith seemed to be making an honest effort in the pool, but her race results hinted of no transcendent transformation. Then, at Princeton, something incredible happened. She got in the water for the 400 IM and, unbelievably, turned back the clock and swam like the carefree kid she used to be. Four hundred yards later, she touched the wall well ahead of the second-place swimmer and looked up at the clock in amazement. Her time was 4:15.86, the fastest she had gone since she was 16. Griffith was so overcome with emotion, she began to cry. Then a few of her teammates started crying, and then some more, and then McKeever cried, and the whole team was hugging. Later that night sophomore backstroker Helen Silver related the story on the phone to her best friend on the team, injured breaststroker Gina Merlone, who was trying to recover from a pair of ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) tears in the same knee. “When you really want to quit swimming, it’s stuff like that that makes you remember why you do it,” Merlone told me later. “God, I miss it so much.”
To McKeever, it also provided her swimmers with an invaluable lesson: that, in the coach’s words, “the payoff doesn’t always come when you want it to come. If you’re enjoying the process, rather than trying to force the payoff, then sometimes great things will happen when you’re not expecting them to.”
It was probably the most emotional moment of Griffith’s Cal career, and had she never again set foot in a pool, she could have walked away with pride and satisfaction over what she had accomplished in that race. Yet in a little more than 2 months’ time, Princeton would no longer rate as Griffith’s crowning moment.
In fact, it wouldn’t even come close.
There was also one not-so-golden moment at the Princeton Invitational, so scary it caused everyone who witnessed it to gasp. Six laps from the completion of the 500-yard freestyle, Cal’s Lauren Medina, who was swimming the best race at that distance of her life, stopped in the middle of the pool and began waving her arms wildly. A lifeguard jumped in and helped her to the wall, and when she got out of the pool she was practically hyperventilating. McKeever, who had come running over, feared that Medina might have choked—or, perhaps, been stricken by something even more frightening.
“I can’t breathe,” Medina told her. The swimmer was shaking; her eyes were filled with fear.
Suddenly, McKeever understood. “Lauren, you’re having a panic attack,” the coach told her. “It’s okay; you’re gonna be fine. Trust me.”
McKeever had experienced her share of anxiety attacks, most of them in the year before Coughlin arrived in Berkeley, when the Mike Walker situation had reached its nadir. She remembered every wretched symptom: the shortness of breath, the rapid heartbeat, the overwhelming feeling of despair. Later, after calming down, Medina was completely embarrassed. Her explanation, months later: “I was swimming so fast that I just freaked out. All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe.”
Over the next few months, however, the problem would persist: Every time Medina would become overwhelmed by the magnitude of her accomplishments in the water, or by what she hoped to accomplish, the panic would return, and she’d have to try to remain calm for the sake of her teammates. And make no mistake—Medina loved her teammates. Fun-loving, effervescent, and relentlessly competitive, Medina, better known as “Salsa,” might have been the team’s most popular swimmer. Though they ran in different social circles, Coughlin adored Medina as a teammate, partly because she emblemized everything laudable about McKeever’s program.
Of all the McKeever Overachievers, Medina was the current poster child. If Haley Cope’s ascent to world-class status was a miracle, the muscular Medina was the poor woman’s version, a low-priority recruit whose drive and ability to respond to coaching had spurred her to increasingly impressive heights.
Raised in the modest suburbs southeast of LA, Medina, a third-generation Mexican-American, was the only girl out of four kids, and the only one for whom music was not a main passion. When Medina was 11—an age at which most of her teammates were already well-established swimmers at various competitive levels—she was visiting her aunt Stella in Pico Rivera on a summer afternoon and fooling around in the backyard pool. “Lauren, you’re a good swimmer,” her aunt noticed. Lauren’s cousin, Chris, told her she should try out for a swim team, and soon she was swimming for a local club called Santa Fe Springs. “I was so happy to be on a team,” Medina recalls. “I would go to practice and then wear my swimsuit and cap around the house the rest of the day.”
Medina’s work ethic helped propel her through the ranks, and while swimming for the Industry Hills Aquatics Club, she ended up with a new coach, Rick Shephard, who drastically upped the training volume. Suddenly Medina, primarily a sprint-freestyler at that point, was doing hard-core distance work and practicing twice a day, 6 days a week, and again on Sunday morning. One day when she was 13, a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy on the team, a high school sophomore with whom she had been friendly, got into an argument with Medina and made a rude and crude comment about her ethnicity. She retreated to the locker room, found a toilet stall, and bawled. When she got home and told her parents, she recalls, “they had a fit. My mom is not someone to mess with. She went ballistic.”
That was it was for Industry Hills. Medina switched to a more prestigious club in Pasadena, Rose Bowl Aquatics. Unfortunately, the twice-daily ½-hour commute each way from her home in West Covina was a killer. By the time she was attending St. Lucy’s, a strict, all-girls Catholic high school in Glendora, Medina was locked into an exhausting schedule: Wake up at 4 a.m., drive to Pasadena for a 2-hour workout, get back in the car for the commute to school, return to Pasadena for a 3½-hour workout, drive home, eat dinner, and collapse. The regimen didn’t do much for her study habits; Medina simply skipped most homework and got by on what she learned in class.
Swimming, as she got older, became more and more of a struggle. “A lot of swimmers peak at 13, then get mediocre and go progressively downhill,” Medina says. “I thought for a long time that I was one of them, and so did my mom. So many times I just wanted to quit. I felt like I was beginning to burn out. People I used to beat were now beating me, I swam lousy in meets, and my parents started getting down on me: ‘You just don’t want it bad enough.’ At least twice a day I would think about quitting.”
As she entered her senior year of high school, however, Medina discovered at least one good reason to continue: She might nab a scholarship, at least a partial one, to swim in college. The big-time programs weren’t recruiting her, but she had attracted attention from Arizona State and some lower-profile swimming schools: Notre Dame, Pacific, the University of San Diego, and several Ivy League colleges. Encouraged by her mother, Medina emailed McKeever and UCLA coach Cyndi Gallagher, though she didn’t expect responses. “I knew it was kind of a reach,” she says. “That night my mom answered the phone, put her hand over the mouthpiece, and said, ‘Oh my God; it’s Teri McKeever!’ ”
Sitting in her Berkeley office, McKeever was mildly intrigued by what little she knew of Medina. “I hadn’t ever seen her swim,” she recalls. “I talked to her club coach, and he told me, ‘She’s a nice girl. She has some talent, but she’s been a little inconsistent.’ I saw her as a depth person, someone who could possibly fill out our relays.”
Medina, meanwhile, was “blown away” by McKeever’s interest. “I didn’t think I was good enough,” she says. “Haley Cope sent me an e-mail, saying, ‘I really think you’d be a good fit,’ and I e-mailed back, ‘Honestly, I don’t feel like I’m on that level.’ Haley responded, ‘Don’t be ridiculous; we wouldn’t be recruiting you if you weren’t.’ ” Medina enjoyed her visit to Cal and was especially taken with McKeever. “A lot of the reason I wanted to go there so badly was because she was a female,” she says. “I was at the point where I just didn’t want to deal with being coached by men.”
In February of her senior year, Medina was on the verge of committing to Cal, when one night she got a phone call from UCLA’s Gallagher. “We don’t know how we missed you,” an apologetic Gallagher said. “Why don’t you come take a visit?” Now Medina was confused: She had always dreamed of attending UCLA—but why was Gallagher suddenly calling now? The reason, she learned much later, was that her mother had called Gallagher and, pretending to be her daughter, left a message touting her credentials. In the end, Medina decided she felt most comfortable with McKeever, who had been interested from the time she got the initial e-mail, and accepted a partial scholarship.
As a freshman, Medina became an immediate contributor, swimming on Cal’s 800-yard freestyle relay that finished ninth at NCAAs and scoring points in freestyle events in dual meets and at the Pac-10 Championships. Academically, however, she was completely under water. The combination of poor study habits, a sudden onslaught of social activities, a renewed commitment to swimming, and the transition to an academically challenging university was too much. “I was so naive,” she says. “I had older friends who had told me, ‘College is so much easier than high school’—but they were going to junior college. I had always done well in high school but hadn’t done any work. I’d also never gone out much in high school—I never had a boyfriend, and I had to ask people to go to my proms. Now, all of a sudden, I had a ton of social options. Meanwhile, I was working so hard in the water. It was so intense. They’re giving you money to come here, and you feel like it’s your job to perform.”
By the end of her freshman year, Medina was on academic probation, perilously close to flunking out. “Teri was so supportive,” Medina recalls. “She recommended I come up and do summer school and take a class that teaches you how to study, and it was a great thing for me. She was just very nurturing. She said, ‘Everybody makes mistakes. You’re not the first person this has happened to. You just need to change your approach and get back on the horse.’ I felt really comforted by that. I come from a nurturing family. It’s not like I need to be babied, but I do well in this type of environment. She understands we get stressed with school. She understands we’re girls. She knows when we’re PMS-ing, that sometimes we’re in a bitchy mood.”
Medina got it together in the classroom, and in the pool she continued to improve. Maybe I didn’t peak at 13, she thought. As a sophomore, she finished seventh in the 200 free at the Pac-10 Championships and qualified for NCAAs, where she also swam on the 800 free relay. But she had a disappointing swim in the 200 free prelims, and the relay finished out of the top 16, the cutoff point for honorable-mention all-American honors (anyone in the top eight is an all-American), which she had earned as a freshman. As the NCAA meet’s final events played out, Medina sat seething in the stands with her teammates at the Martin Aquatics Center in Auburn and had an epiphany: That’s it—I’m tired of being mediocre. I can be better than this, and I refuse not to be.
Adam Crossen, McKeever’s assistant at the time, noticed how visibly peeved Medina was and walked her down to a corridor outside the pool area for a private discussion. “She had trained hard that year, but it hadn’t been validated,” Crossen says. “She had gotten nervous and flopped at the meet, and she felt like she had let the team down. She said, ‘Adam, I’m bummed. I’m never gonna do well.’ There were mental barriers she had to overcome.”
Recalls Medina: “I think I was jealous—of Auburn, which won the championship in its own pool, and of Natalie. I knew I was never going to be on her level, but I wanted to be in that area.”
“I’m fed up with this,” Medina told Crossen. “I don’t want to sit here next year in this same position, having regrets, wishing I had trained harder and gone faster.”
“Then you need to make that happen,” Crossen told her. “You need to be consistent. You need to want it. You need to push yourself and the people around you, all the time.”
“I’ll do it,” Medina told him, glaring. “This will not happen again.”
That Coughlin would become such an unabashed fan of Medina’s was hardly a shock. It was no coincidence that each of her best friends on the team—Emma Palsson, Marcelle Miller, Micha Burden, and Lisa Morelli—was a hardworking overachiever. Palsson, a sprint-freestyler from Skanor, Sweden, was a former member of that country’s junior national team who decided to attend college in the United States. “We didn’t even see her swim before we offered her a (partial) scholarship,” Crossen recalls. “We just made the offer and took a chance.” Miller, a breaststroker from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, also arrived at Cal sight unseen; she had been recommended by her club coach and joined the team as a walk-on. Burden, an amiable and attractive Alaskan, was swimming at Golden West Junior College in Southern California when McKeever showed up at one of her meets. Burden was so stunned and excited that she started to cry. Morelli spent most of her life on the East Coast until the summer before her senior year, when her family moved to San Diego. She, too, was surprised to have Cal as an option; her distaste for the snobby environment of Torrey Pines High School helped her gravitate toward Berkeley’s unpretentious campus, where she wowed teammates with her radiant smile, dogged work ethic, and, on occasion, amazing capacity for chugging beer.
Watching women like this grow as people and swimmers and reach their potential in the team context was what Coughlin loved most about college swimming. But this was no typical college season; everything Coughlin experienced had to be viewed under the Olympic microscope as well. And while the Bears beamed over what had gone down in New Jersey, Coughlin fretted over her inability to return to pre-Barcelona form.
Sitting in her office in Berkeley shortly after the Princeton meet, McKeever was asked if she believed Coughlin was nervous. “Oh, yeah. Definitely,” the coach answered. “I mean, she’s had 4 years of being a sure bet to win a bunch of medals, and now that we’re getting close, her body isn’t right. I think stuff from the last Olympics is coming up, but it’s a delicate situation, and I’m not sure what the best way is to handle it. I don’t want to rip off the scabs by probing too deeply. First of all, I don’t know what the issues are. Secondly, I’m not sure she even knows what they are. I mean, she’s only 21.
“So, she’s nervous because of that, and because of what happened at Worlds, and because of what’s going on out here every day in practice. In Barcelona, her body failed her, which is what happened before the last Olympics. And I think that worries her. Today, she said to me, ‘I haven’t had a good practice in 3 months.’ I said, ‘Nat, you haven’t had a great practice in 3 months, but you’ve done some good things.’
“I’ve started keeping a journal for her, to show her how she’s made progress. And I’m trying not to make it so much of a grind. About 3 weeks ago I took her out of spin and told her to stop coming into the weight room for a while. Today, I let her write her own workout—and the workout for the whole team. Now, did she really write it? Not really. I asked her what she wanted to do, right before practice, and then I said, ‘Here’s what I was thinking.’ She basically took that and made up the workout. So, hopefully, that’s close enough for her to think of it as hers.
“There’s so much pressure going on in her life right now,” McKeever continued. “She’s taking her biggest academic load ever, and she’s not a student who’s going to settle for Cs—that’s not her personality. She just bought a condo. She’s been there a month, and she wants it to look a certain way. And it disrupted her routine. It’s different not being a few blocks away—that’s why, instead of going home and taking a nap, she’s been hanging out in my office all day.”
The departure of Cope, her longtime training partner, served as another disruption to Coughlin’s world. “I worry about how Natalie is with that,” McKeever said. “She says she’s fine, but Haley said she was fine, too. They’ll turn on you fast.” McKeever laughed, then went on. “I mean, is Nat concerned because she lost a training partner? Does she feel like she’s getting shortchanged here, too—like it’s hurting her preparation? Does she feel all alone? The saving grace is Keiko (Price); she is just such an awesome person. But still, I think about it.”
On the other hand, McKeever seemed more at peace with Cope’s decision than she’d been in its immediate aftermath. “Haley tried to make it personal, but I’m not going to let it be about that,” McKeever said. “She’s a person who has always done unusual things when she’s nervous. I mean, let’s face it, she was practically unknown when she came here, and she’s realized almost all of her dreams. If she gets to the Olympics, it won’t just be because of what she’d done over the final stretch; it will also be because of her time here, plain and simple.”
Yet being blindsided by the departure of a swimmer with whom she’d once been so bonded clearly weighed on McKeever as she tried to contend with Coughlin’s winter blahs. “I want to make sure Nat’s okay with what we’re doing, and it’s hard sometimes, because we are so close,” McKeever continued. “Will she tell me if it’s not good, or does she not want to hurt my feelings? Similarly, I don’t want her to feel like I’m getting on her. But I’m trying to be more proactive, to ask her how she’s doing more, and to be more ‘on it’ with her workouts. And you know what? Maybe this is for the best. Maybe Haley leaving will help Natalie, because now she has even more of my attention.”
There was one Coughlin-related responsibility McKeever couldn’t wait to shed: her unofficial role as manager, interview arranger, and agent. That wouldn’t happen until March at the earliest, after Coughlin’s collegiate career officially ended. But the more legwork she and Coughlin could do before NCAAs, the more quickly the swimmer could close a deal and turn pro. That said, this was a huge decision, and McKeever was intent on helping Coughlin make the right choice.
“The agent thing is a real stress, too,” McKeever said. “We wanted to get interviews done in November, but there was no way we were prepared enough. I want her to go into the interviews with a game plan, and we weren’t ready. We’re going to try to get them done in January, and then hopefully she’ll make a decision pretty quickly in March, right after NCAAs. I told her, ‘I think we need to limit the number of interviews. It’s like college recruiting. You can’t talk to everyone.’ And I think ultimately she’ll approach this like she did when she was choosing a college. She’ll feel comfortable with someone and won’t be afraid to think outside the box. Just as, on paper, Cal wasn’t the logical place to sign, but she had a feeling that she’d fit in here.”
It’s just that now, even as the Bears began to gel into a cohesive unit, Coughlin was very much in a realm of her own.