In January 2004, most Cal students were either chilling at their parents’ pads or shredding at Lake Tahoe’s ski resorts. But when you’re a member of a big-time collegiate swim team, one of the perks of your existence—a sort of compensation for the many hours spent toiling in practice—is the annual training trip before the start of the winter break. The trip’s purpose is twofold: to prepare for the most important portion of the NCAA season and to facilitate team bonding. The locations vary, though the goal, for the most part, is to go someplace warm.
This year, McKeever had planned a doozy. The Golden Bears would fly to Sydney, Australia, in the heart of the Aussie summer, and sharpen their skills in a swimming-obsessed country. Largely because of Coughlin’s notoriety, the Bears would get to hobnob with 2000 Olympic hero Ian Thorpe, a cross between Elvis Presley and Michael Jordan in his country, as well as 1972 multi-champion Shane Gould, her country’s version of Mark Spitz. There was an ancillary benefit, of course, to meeting with Gould—her boyfriend, Milt Nelms, would be there, too.
When the Bears’ long flight touched down at Sydney Airport, Nelms and Gould were there to greet them. When the stroke consultant saw Coughlin disembark, he was startled by her appearance. “I was shocked when she came off the plane,” he says. “She always looks so vibrant, electric, and springy, but this time she looked like crap. She was kind of wan, soft looking, and exhausted. I knew she wasn’t right.”
Over the next 9 days, McKeever allowed Coughlin to spend her mornings with Nelms in an adjacent pool while she and Hite put the rest of the team through its typical workout. It was a boon to Coughlin’s mindset and pre-Olympic preparation—the most extended stretch of quality time she’d had with Nelms. Other than McKeever, Nelms was the only person Coughlin trusted to assess her technique, and even with the Games closing in, she was open to trying new things. “Teri had her do a lot of aggressive downtime, and we got to spend more time in the water than we ever had in the past,” Nelms says. “That’s when I really started to pick up some information. I learned a lot about how she learns, and I came to the conclusion that the less you say, the better. It’s mostly her asking questions and me trying to get her to a place where she’s comfortable.”
Yet not everything was hunky-dory Down Under. The anti-Coughlin sentiment had swelled among her teammates in the weeks leading up to the trip, and now her presumed preferential treatment became the prime topic of discussion. The team was bonding, all right—united in its censure of the Bears’ star swimmer.
“Everyone was saying stuff in the locker room,” backstroker Helen Silver recalled several months after the trip. “We were doing all these things as a team, and Natalie would be off with Keiko (Price) or Milt. It kind of felt like the things she and Teri were working for were separate from what we were doing as a team.”
Coughlin’s close friend Marcelle Miller admits that she, too, began to get caught up in the “Why isn’t Natalie here?” feeding frenzy. “Natalie was working with Milt, missing practices, and it bothered me at first,” she says. “Then I thought about it, how she was spending her whole day in the water while the rest of us would go out and have fun. She didn’t get to enjoy Australia at all. She was there to seriously improve her technique. I finally decided, ‘I’m not gonna get worked up about whether she’s here or not.’ But I was in the minority. No one was talking about it in front of Natalie, but everyone was thinking it. They were all mad at her. We had a bad team attitude.”
So, while Cal swimmers were shopping, sightseeing, sunning, and sampling kangaroo meat, Coughlin was playing the role of visiting celebrity, meeting and greeting various Australian luminaries. She did get to join the team on its breathtaking climb to the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, complete with a resounding, back-and-forth “Go Bears” cheer at the apex. Coughlin was also present for the trip’s most memorable encounter, which began one afternoon as the swimmers were kicking back on the beach outside their hotel in Cornulla, about 45 miles south of Sydney. In a prearranged bit of scheduling magic, up walked Ian Thorpe, the country’s biggest sports celebrity. He hung out for a while and chatted up Coughlin and many of the other Cal swimmers. Then, to their surprise, he said, “Hey, why don’t you come up to my house for a barbecue?”
That hadn’t been part of the plan. Soon there was shrimp on the barbie—as well as steak and chicken and sausages—and the freshly tanned swimmers, now sporting skirts and dresses, rolled up in cars driven by Thorpe’s friends. “It was a huge, perfect party house,” Silver recalls. “There was a dock with a boat, a pool and hot tub, and a pool table. We played pool, hung out with his friends, and had fresh fruit for dessert. It was an amazing night.”
The swimmers hit the dance floor, grooving to tunes like “Beautiful” by Snoop Dogg and Pharell, and Justin Timberlake’s “Rock Your Body.” They cooed over Thorpe’s new Labrador puppy—until the diminutive dog ate so much barbecue that he threw up. The only collective moment of regret came when Thorpe, standing behind a full bar, asked, “Your coach is cool with you having a drink, right?” Remembering that this was indeed a training trip, the swimmers declined.
Most of the time in Sydney, though, Coughlin could sense the intra-squad tension—and she wasn’t the only one picking up on the negative vibes. “Teri is very intuitive and aware,” Miller says. “A lot of girls on the team don’t give her enough credit for that. She really does know everything. At times, she might seem a little bit paranoid, but she has a better handle on what’s happening than most people realize.”
McKeever called a team meeting one afternoon after practice, gathering the Bears in a trailer next to the pool. When she began talking, some swimmers expected her to try to smooth things over and convince them Coughlin was working as hard as they were. Instead, she angrily addressed the complaints and patently dismissed them, saying, “Natalie is the reason we were able to come to Australia in the first place, and she’s the reason we have a lot of things we have. So if you don’t agree with her approach, you’re just going to have to deal with it. She’s working on some things that are important to her training, and how she prepares is none of your business. You guys need to stop worrying about what she’s doing and focus on yourselves.”
McKeever teared up as she spoke; so, too, did Coughlin. Sitting in a chair near the back of the room, Coughlin thought to herself, It feels like the whole team is against me. Don’t they realize how hurtful they are?
Finally, McKeever turned toward Coughlin and said, “I’m not sure if Natalie would want me to share this with you, but she confided in me the other day that she wants to have the best Olympics of any swimmer in history. So, believe me, she’s not slacking off. She’s trying to set world records and win gold medals.”
The meeting didn’t resolve the situation—Coughlin still felt stung by the in-house criticism, which didn’t totally subside. But the air had been cleared, and that alone relieved much of the pressure that had been building for weeks. “I respected Teri for getting it out in the open,” Silver says. “It wasn’t unspoken anymore, and that allowed us to move forward. One thing I realized is that I don’t understand the pressure of being Natalie Coughlin.”
Says Miller: “I give Teri a lot of credit: She talked about the big pink elephant in the room. Overall, it helped the team bond. Because it wasn’t just ignored, and because it came from Teri, people were able to get over it and loosen up.”
Freshman Erin Reilly, for one, felt a strong surge of empathy for her celebrated teammate. “I felt so bad for her,” Reilly says. “She gave up so much to stick around another year, and to have her teammates not even embrace her must have been really tough. I can’t even imagine what she put up with all season, and through it all she just carried herself so well. She’d do something amazing in the pool and it was like everyone expected it. It sucks for her that her own teammates wouldn’t even get that excited.”
So much of McKeever’s coaching philosophy centered around team bonding, a curious approach, given swimming’s innately individualistic setup. Yet McKeever believed chemistry could go a long way toward improving a team’s collective standing, and she did her best to facilitate it at every turn. At the start of the fall semester, the Bears had gone on a “team retreat,” spending a weekend at a Lake Tahoe cabin during which they laid out their goals, sang Cal fight songs, and engaged in role-playing games designed to forge togetherness. In September they all swam the Tiburon Mile in the frigid Pacific Ocean. In January, after returning from Sydney, they would do a series of exercises with Kathie Wickstrand-Gahen, involving behavioral tests that grouped McKeever, Hite, and the swimmers according to preset categories.
Then there were the exceptionally well-planned recruiting weekends, which inevitably included team outings and gatherings at McKeever’s house. And those efforts paid off in a big way.
In early November 2003, Emily Silver called to tell McKeever she would be attending Cal. Then she phoned her sister, Helen, who had several Cal teammates in her apartment at the time. Helen began screaming joyously; then she and her jubilant friends took to the streets to spread the news to others on the team, and an impromptu celebration ensued.
Emily Silver’s signing, in McKeever’s eyes, was the difference between a subpar recruiting class and a terrific one. That’s how good McKeever thought the sprint freestyler was, with the potential to become even better. The Bears had lost out to Texas in the battle for backstroker Diana MacManus and failed to attract Candace Weiman, a swimmer from nearby Castro Valley who had considered coming home to the East Bay after starring at Alabama; instead, she chose to transfer to Florida. Two other highly rated swimmers, Brooke Bishop and Erica Liu, chose Stanford over Cal. The Bears had signed some intriguing swimmers for the ’04–’05 season, including backstroker/IMer Emily Verdin and breaststrokers Genna Patterson and Jenna Rinaldi, but there was no instant star in the mix. Emily Silver, Helen’s smooth, ever-smiling, 5-foot-11 kid sister, changed all that. The fact that a sprint-freestyle star was exactly what the Bears needed most made it an even bigger coup.
Silver had briefly considered Auburn, the defending national champion, and Arizona, whose already strong program was on the rise, before settling on the Bears. McKeever had been cautiously optimistic about landing her, but it was a tricky proposition. Not only did she have to convince Emily that she was interested in her, and not merely in tapping the family bloodline, but she also had to make sure that Helen didn’t feel overshadowed by her immensely talented sister. For all the times McKeever had grown frustrated with Helen, she also was exceedingly proud of the backstroke specialist, who had surprised observers throughout the nation by emerging as a standout freshman the previous year. At one point, out of respect for Helen’s status and contributions to the program, McKeever called the sophomore into her office and said, “Helen, you do realize that you are my number-one priority, right? I’d love to have Emily come here, but if you feel uncomfortable with that in any way, I’ll stop recruiting her right now.”
It was hardly unpredictable that Helen, the third of four kids in the Silver family, told McKeever that wouldn’t be necessary—she wanted Emily at Cal more than anyone. In October, when McKeever sat down to dinner with Emily and her folks in their home in Bainbridge Island, Washington (near Seattle), and said to the high school swimmer, “I want to offer you a full scholarship,” Bob and Mary Sue began to cry with joy.
Emily was a good bet to succeed as a collegian: Like Helen, she hadn’t been overtrained while under the tutelage of a reasonably restrained youth club coach. She was also very serious about her craft, as evidenced by her decision to forgo the second semester of her senior year of high school to move to Southern California and train with Dave Salo at Irvine Novaquatics (while doing independent study to complete her course-work). Then again, projecting the contributions of incoming recruits is not an exact science. Abrupt quitting is so endemic to swimming that losing one or two signees is almost inevitable; indeed, breaststroker Jenna Rinaldi, from North Carolina, would last a week with the team the following August before deciding to walk away.
“It’s so funny when you recruit,” Coughlin said one morning at Fatapple’s in North Berkeley. “You hear, ‘This person’s gonna be good. That person’s not that good,’ but you never really know. We’ve had big-time recruits who really struggled their freshman year. Then you have someone like Erin Reilly, who no one’s expecting anything from, and she’s terrific. She trains so hard, and even when she’s tired, she can do amazing things.”
From her first few practices at Cal, it was apparent that Reilly, a superskinny strawberry blonde from Sacramento, had been drastically undervalued in the recruiting process. “I wish we had more than 11 months to work with her,” Whitney Hite told me during a practice in late August, gesturing toward the freckled stick figure who was gliding through a protracted freestyle set in the far left lane at Spieker Pool.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “She’s only going to be here for one season?”
“No. I mean, more than 11 months until the Olympic Trials.”
“Wow,” I said. “She’s that good?
Hite nodded and said, “She could be.”
The only problem was, Reilly would’ve been the last person to believe him.
Actually, it was a multifaceted problem, beginning with the fact that Erin was never supposed to be a star—her older sister, Brenda, was. Ever since they were a pair of redheaded pool rats tooling around Westchester County, a suburb of New York City, the Reilly girls had clearly defined roles—Brenda as the driven future Olympian, Erin as the shy, supportive younger sibling. “I was on a team since I was 4 because of my sister, but back then, to me it was a joke,” Erin recalls. “Everyone was nice to me because my sister was there, but I didn’t take it very seriously. My friends and I would go to the bottom of the deep end and take long showers.”
By the time she was 16, Brenda owned most of the New York State age-group records in the sprint-freestyle events and was still harboring Olympic aspirations. She moved from the Westchester Middies to the prestigious Badger Swim Club in nearby Larchmont, New York, where coach John Collins, a former American record holder in the 200-yard butterfly, had a stable of renowned swimmers. Erin, who was 10 at the time, was on the verge of quitting the sport and taking up soccer. “My mom told the coach at Badger, ‘Erin’s pretty much done; she hates it,’ ” Reilly recalls. “But they convinced me to give it a try.”
Swimming for Badger assistant Carlie Fiero stirred something in Erin, who began to view practices in an entirely different light. “Carlie was really tough and strict, but she was fair and honest, too,” Erin says. “No one had ever really said that I’d be good before, and she made it worth it to work hard. I remember at the end of every practice, we’d swim a 50 for time with fins. If you beat the preassigned time, she’d give you one of these sour watermelon-wedge candies, and I was very motivated by that.”
As Erin was blossoming as a distance freestyler and butterfly specialist, Brenda was experiencing the harsh side of swimming that afflicts so many young standouts. Early in her junior year of high school, she tore cartilage in her left knee, had surgery, and struggled to regain her prior form. She was good enough to get a scholarship to Notre Dame and have a commendable collegiate career but, says Erin, was “burned out” by the time she arrived in South Bend, Indiana.
Conscious of their elder daughter’s plight, John and Mary Jane Reilly were especially careful with Erin as she rose through the youth ranks. “My sister started lifting weights at 12 and doing doubles (two workouts a day) in sixth or seventh grade,” Erin says. “She was thinking Olympics, and she ended up getting so burned-out on the sport. So my parents were super, super protective when it came to me. They wanted five practices a week and nothing more, and they battled my coaches all the way through high school.”
By then John had taken a job in Sacramento—the family of six (Erin has older and younger brothers) packed up and drove west before Erin entered the seventh grade, dropping off Brenda for her freshman year at Notre Dame along the way—and Erin had endured a coaching switch at her local club, Arden Hills, which soured her on the sport once more. She wanted to swim with the Sierra Marlins, a club that was a 40-minute drive from her home, but, she recalls, “my parents were not very supportive. They said, ‘If you love the sport enough, you’ll get it done where you are.’ ” She stayed at Arden Hills, where her new coach demanded she practice twice a day. Reilly’s mother told the coach one practice a day would be fine, thank you, and finally relented in Erin’s junior year of high school.
It was during that season that McKeever went to a high school sectionals meet to watch a recruit named Cheryl Anne Bingaman, who had signed a letter of intent to attend Cal out of Lodi High and would, as a freshman, earn all-American honors by swimming on the Bears’ third-place, 400-yard freestyle relay at the 2003 NCAAs. While scouting Bingaman, McKeever kept noticing the slender junior who was breaking sectional records and, more important to the Cal coach, appearing to exert very little effort in the process.
“I was like, ‘Who’s that?’ ” McKeever remembers. “I said, ‘Move that girl up the list; she’s good.’ Her sister had a Stanford sweatshirt on, which wasn’t very encouraging, but I was definitely going to give it a try.”
Up to that point, Reilly had envisioned herself swimming at a lower-level program such as Boston College’s or Northeastern’s—or, perhaps, following in Brenda’s footsteps at Notre Dame. Georgia and Auburn, the nation’s top two schools, each sent her questionnaires, neither of which she bothered to fill out. “I’d had a good run, and I had been getting better every year, but I still didn’t think I wanted to go to a top team and have it be just swimming,” she says. “I didn’t know if I was that good, or if I wanted to make that much of a commitment.”
When McKeever called Reilly’s club coach to inform him of her interest, Reilly’s reaction was far from positive. “I said, ‘There is no way I’d ever go to Berkeley,’ ” she recalls. “I had been down there, and my feeling was ‘I hate Telegraph Avenue. It’s gross. I don’t care if it’s a good academic school. It’s not for me.’ ” At the end of Reilly’s junior year, McKeever showed up to watch one of her practices on a brutally hot Sacramento afternoon. “It was 110°, and Teri was dressed in nice clothes, just dying during my practice,” Reilly says. “She came over for dinner, and my little brother, just to be stupid, wore a huge Notre Dame shirt. I remember that she had such a nice feel about her and the way she talked about swimming. I could tell I would be comfortable swimming for her, and my parents loved her. She said, ‘You need to be at a top school. You’re that good.’ So I took a visit and was weirdly blown away.”
Buoyed by McKeever’s interest, Reilly ended up taking trips to Notre Dame, Northwestern, Texas, and Virginia, none of which compared to her Cal visit. “It was so well organized, and they treated us so well,” she says. “I was sold.”
When McKeever and Hite saw Reilly swim up close, they were beyond sold. They knew they had landed a sleeper recruit who had a chance to get better each year; now they had to convince her of that. Whereas Ashley Chandler, Cal’s other talented distance freestyler/butterflier with that kind of talent, seemed to drive herself with an inner fury, the ever-amiable Reilly was almost compliant in her approach. The two would push each other, lap after endless practice lap, but while Chandler was upping her game to meet the challenge of a raw newcomer, a typical occurrence in sports, Reilly sheepishly marveled at the notion of keeping up with the former national champion. At first, Reilly admits, “I was really shy and nervous around everyone. They’d make weird jokes, and I didn’t know how to respond.” Mostly, Reilly kept quiet, put her goggles on, and swam, her efforts getting more and more impressive. Qualifying for the NCAA Championships was her only goal, and she did so with more than 3 months to spare, hitting her “A” cut, as part of the 800 free relay, in the Princeton Invitational.
When she got to Australia, Reilly was still coming to terms with her burgeoning potential. During one of the Bears’ first practices there, she caught the eye of Milt Nelms, who later pulled her aside for some individual instruction. “The first time Milt saw her was during a full-team practice, and he noticed her immediately,” McKeever recalls. “She has a nice relationship with the water. Sometimes she lets that get in the way. She gets real effortless. It looks easy, efficient. She has to see herself at a higher level and push past that.”
In Australia, Reilly also began to adjust her head position during the freestyle stroke, moving it from an more upright stance to one more in line with the rest of her body. Over the next few months, Hite helped rid her of another bad habit—breathing into or out of a turn, an inefficient no-no in racing. Every time the coach noticed Reilly taking an ill-advised breath in practice, Hite would make her do five pushups.
What Reilly needed most of all, though, was some Coughlinesque drive and swagger. In Coughlin’s words, “It’s almost like Erin’s scared to be good. Because she really could do some awesome things.” With so much riding on her senior season—her dream of beating Stanford, a chance to win a national title in the 800 free relay—Coughlin was going to do everything she could to stoke Reilly’s competitive fires.
As the Bears returned from Australia and began preparing for the stretch of five dual meets against Pac-10 rivals they hoped to sweep, the internal criticism of Coughlin subsided. Such was the paradox of her place on the team—at times some swimmers might have groused about her perceived perks, but they damn sure loved her come race day.
The more important the meet, the more the other Bears appreciated the three individual victories Coughlin guaranteed—usually not in her best events—along with the single relay she’d propel to an enormous lead. Some team members might have wished she’d been more engaged or overtly involved in motivating the other swimmers, but in the heat of battle, nobody was in a position to complain.
Other than a couple of throwaway races as a freshman, in nonconference meets that had already been decided in the Bears’ favor, Coughlin had never lost a race for Cal. This was true not only in dual meets but also at the NCAA Championships. It might have been tempting to attribute that incredible run to talent alone, but to do so would have been an injustice. Every athlete, no matter how skilled, has a bad day at some point—that Coughlin had endured hers without losing was a testament to her relentlessly competitive nature.
That, too, was something her teammates understood better than anyone. The rest of the world saw her all-American looks and graceful manner, both of which obscured the fire within. Like Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, and so many other champion athletes, Coughlin won most of all because she absolutely refused to tolerate the horrific alternative.
Haley Cope recalls being stunned by the sight of Coughlin’s perpetually bloody lower lip during big meets. “I came to realize that when it really starts to hurt, Natalie bites down—so her legs will hurt less than her mouth,” Cope says. “You could tell how hard she was working by the way she looked. If she had blisters on the bottom of her lip by the end of the meet, you knew she’d been pushed. I think she has a bizarrely high pain tolerance, and a lot of that is pure will. Her pain tolerance is somewhere the rest of us won’t go.”
Even amid her highly competitive teammates, Coughlin’s aversion to losing was on an entirely different level. Some accused her of cheating during the games of Scattergories the Bears played while hosting dinners for recruits at McKeever’s house; at the very least, Coughlin was guilty of getting intensely involved in the board game, exhorting those on her team to share her determination to win. In the pool, Coughlin could be similarly passionate, bristling when teammates left early at the start of sets.
“As much as Natalie likes to win, she hates losing much, much more,” Cope says. “If she gets beat in anything, the relationship dynamics change pretty quickly. There’s a difference between the piddly people like me who break the occasional world record and Natalie. I’m a like-to-win person; as long as I did fairly well, I’m pretty happy with myself. If Natalie went under the former world record in a race and still got beat, she’d be pissed.”
Even something seemingly as innocuous as a game of sharks and minnows, one of McKeever’s rewards for enduring the rigors of practices—which at the same time honed hypoxic skills—had the potential for combustion. The game, in which some swimmers are “sharks” who try to force the “minnows” to the pool’s surface, calls for captured swimmers to reenter the water and join the sharks. When the Bears played toward the end of a practice shortly after they’d returned from the 2002 NCAA Championships, assistant Adam Crossen decreed that the last remaining minnow would be allowed to skip the rest of the workout. Coughlin, not unpredictably, was intent on winning, and eventually a gang of inspired sharks darted toward the bottom of the pool to foil her.
Coughlin failed to honor Berkeley’s tradition of nonviolent resistance. Marcelle Miller, one of her best friends, took a vicious kick to the chest; other teammates ended up with punches and scratches. Coughlin’s freshman roommate, Kyoko Yokouchi, punched her in the mouth. By now Coughlin had won as the last remaining minnow, but out of principle, her teammates wanted her brought to the surface. Natalie Griffith took the lead in doing so, and she and Coughlin—and virtually everyone else—ended the game with scowls on their faces.
That was the last time the Bears played sharks and minnows.