Dana Vollmer looks healthy, which is saying something. Reclining on an aluminum bleacher bench in blue Cal sweats and a white T-shirt, watching recreational swimmers thrashing in the pool where she’s just worked out, the 19-year-old swimmer says she’s happy with her surroundings, her workout, her life, and most especially, her swim coach.

An Olympic gold medalist at 16, Vollmer was heavily recruited out of high school in Granbury, Texas, and ultimately chose the University of Florida, thinking the Gators’ famous heavy yardage-based workout routine would be good for her. Instead, she got injured. The distance and repetition aggravated a back injury and re-awakened a shoulder problem, and by year’s end she was out of sorts, frustrated and unhappy.

Remembering McKeever’s reputation as a healer—established with Coughlin, who came to Cal from her Concord-area high school burned out by a lingering shoulder injury and traditional workouts—Vollmer chose to transfer to Berkeley in May 2006. Ten months later, she finished with a meet record at the NCAA Championships and swam on three Americanrecord- setting relay teams. At the World Championships in Melbourne in March of this year, Vollmer teamed with Coughlin and two other swimmers to set a world record in the 800- meter freestyle relay.

McKeever’s focus on mixed training and perfect technique over distance has saved Vollmer’s back, she says, and restored her passion for swimming.

“This is why I love it here,” she says. “Last year, I had this thing in my stroke, it just felt off. I asked Teri, and she said, ‘Ah, you’re doing this’”—Vollmer stops and leans forward, popping out her back—“‘Try this.’” She leans backward, elongates her neck, and concludes, “And it worked. They never would have said that at Florida. They would have said, ‘OK, go back, do some more yardage.’”

McKeever insists repeatedly that she doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with the way swimmers train at Florida or anywhere else. It’s just, she says, that some swimmers fit with her personality, and some don’t. Vollmer happens to be a good fit.

“I think that if a Dana Vollmer is at Florida, and she’s floundering, and she can go somewhere else and blossom, then isn’t that what being a coach is, too?” McKeever says. “That’s being an educator, that’s finding a way to inspire, and it doesn’t make Florida wrong. It just says that for this young lady, her physical limitations, her personality, this is a better fit.”

One thing that marks McKeever’s recruiting of young swimmers is her ability to predict the good fits. Although superior talents such as Coughlin and Vollmer are highly prized, McKeever recruits by considering how a prospective swimmer will fit in at Cal as an athlete, a student, and a person. She pitches them the academic excellence and cultural diversity of the campus, and tells them her goal is to win an NCAA Championship and have students with the highest GPAs in the country. She wants the type of person, she says, who is “attracted to a campus that challenges you academically and forces you to be your best, day in and day out, to be successful.”

“She recruits the person, then teaches them how to be a performing athlete,” says Nelms, the Australian swim coach.

Mother Bear: McKeever instructs her swimmers as they demonstrate drills, then makes a point to participants of the Cal Summer Swim Camp for Boys and Girls.

The evidence, he says, is in McKeever’s Cal relay teams, which at the last NCAA Championship meet set American records in the 400-yard medley, 400-yard freestyle, and 800-yard freestyle relays. Although national teams don’t often swim those events (international meet races are measured in meters, not yards), it’s still impressive. To take a crack at those records, USA Swimming coaches can in theory pick from the entire pool of women swimmers in the country—professional, college, and high school. McKeever selected four women from her 22-member Cal team, and then watched the records fall.

“The consistency of having a successful program, that speaks to a system or an organization where success is possible, not just sort of blips on the radar,” McKeever says. “Obviously, Natalie is a huge blip on the radar, and so’s Dana, but there are a lot of people who have done really extraordinary things here and no one will ever know. Things that are as extraordinary as breaking a world record and winning a gold medal. And that brings me as much joy as seeing Natalie up there.”

For a Cal fan, though, the best part of this story is that Teri McKeever is still around. In April 2006, after she’d just wrapped up her 14th year at Berkeley, McKeever was offered the head coaching job at USC—her alma mater, and the place where her father and his twin brother were All-America football players, the first place she ever had a job coaching swimming. And after thinking it over, McKeever turned the job down and decided to stay at Cal.

“I love … this campus and university, what I perceive the message to be,” McKeever says. “I love the fact that there are women on my team who never would have come in contact with each other unless they swam. I think that is reflective—that someone has this interest and someone [else] has these interests, swimming brought them here but they both … love Cal.”

In that sense, McKeever parallels women’s basketball coach Joanne Boyle, who turned down a similarly appealing offer earlier this year to coach at Duke, her alma mater. It’s just a sign of how evolved both are, says Michael Silver, an alum and former senior writer for Sports Illustrated, who spent two years following Coughlin and McKeever for his 2006 book Golden Girl.

“What Teri and Joanne have in common, they’re so down with the Cal mission, so in love with this place, that each of them sort of turned down this dream job at their alma mater against all logic,” Silver says, before concluding triumphantly, “which makes me think they’re as sick as we are and will stay forever.”

“Forever” may not be exactly right—in Silver’s book, McKeever is asked if she’d stay permanently at Cal and responds with an emphatic “hell, no.” (Spoiler alert: the question is posed by a stranger who goes on to become McKeever’s husband.) But for a mothering swim coach, it’s never easy to give up your kids.

“If you would have told me that being the oldest of 10, I was never going to have a family, never in a million years would that happen,” McKeever says. “What I’ve come to terms with now, my family looks different than I ever thought it was, but they are my family in a different way. And I have children, and I am parenting, it’s just different.”

Different—kind of like a swim team dancing hip-hop to stay in shape. So when the 2007–08 season starts this fall, McKeever’s family will be back in the dance studio, celebrating that difference.

Eric Simons, M.J. ’08, is a California magazine intern and attends the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley.

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