Photographs by Anne Dowie

At the beginning of the 2006–07 collegiate swim season, cal Women’s swimming coach Teri McKeever, and the team’s gym trainer, Devin Wicks, met to discuss out-of-the-pool training for the upcoming year. McKeever’s traditional training routine of yoga and Pilates, even though it was still seen as typical Berkeley eccentricity by many swim coaches, was growing stale. The swimmers were getting tired of it. The coach was worried.

“But,” McKeever said, “we really want to work on balance and body movement and coordination.”

“Yeah,” Wicks said, “that’s just like dance.”

“Well,” McKeever said, thinking it over, “why can’t we dance? Why can’t we dance for like 45 minutes a day?”

So that’s what they did. The swimmers danced a few days a week—“this whole hip-hop dance and stuff,” is how McKeever describes it—and kept it up all the way through their school-record third place team finish at the 2007 college national championships. (And then, just for good measure, they danced at McKeever’s wedding a month after the championship meet.)

It’s a plan of action that probably wouldn’t occur to most high-level college swim coaches (most of whom happen to be men), and a reason why Teri McKeever is considered an innovator in a sport that tends overwhelmingly toward stolid, tried’n-true yardage-based training. It’s also probably what makes her so successful. McKeever’s accomplishments to date: First woman coach on the U.S. Olympic Swimming team. First woman to be named head coach of the national team at a major international meet (the 2006 Pan Pacific meet in British Columbia). Eleven straight top-ten team finishes by Cal swimmers at the NCAA championships.

“You can’t mess with the results,” says former Cal assistant Whitney Hite, who’s now the head coach at the University of Washington. “Teri’s ways work.”

McKeever also is known as a coach who turns previously unnoticed swimmers into major talents, and talented-but-burned-out swimmers into Olympians and world champions. Current and former pupils include Olympians Dana Vollmer, Jessica Hardy, Haley Cope, Staciana Stitts—and Natalie Coughlin, who credits McKeever with resurrecting Coughlin’s swimming career and helping her to win five medals, including two golds, at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

“Obviously,” says Coughlin, who three years after graduating and going pro still trains with McKeever at the campus pool, “she’s been a big part of my career.”

Tall, lean, and tanned, 45-year-old Teri McKeever strides the pool deck imperiously, ash-blond curls tucked into a faded Cal baseball cap, stopwatch cords dangling from the pockets of her blue sweatpants. One hand clutches the first of her three breakfast Diet Pepsis. (“It’s like coffee,” she says. “Just cold.”) It’s a fairly typical 6 a.m. practice at Spieker Aquatics Complex, except there’s no fog, so the rising sun is lighting up the church across the street and the top of the eight-story Unit 3 dorms. Fifteen swim-capped heads lining the shaded north edge of the pool are turned in the direction of the coach as the swimmers rest between sets.

This is McKeever’s laboratory, where dance class meets praxis. Here “Teri’s ways” come to life in a blend of specific commands to move body part A to spot B, with other general orders to “take care of the water” and “wait for the water” and “breathe more life into your body.”

“Feeling the water” is key to a swimmer’s success. Those who have some natural comfort with moving in a fluid environment—like Coughlin, who’s often described as a “physical genius”—usually succeed. Those who don’t have that ability need to learn some approximation of it (or take up something land-based). Awareness in the water is teachable, at least, which is where dance classes help. Turns out if you’ve got better balance and body awareness on land, you can take it into the pool with you.

“I always tell the girls, if you’re going to get in a fight with the water, guess who’s going to win,” McKeever says. “Being a good swimmer is being one with the water.”

McKeever’s poolside instructions are delivered confidently and smoothly, in a deep voice that’s perfect for jokes and sarcasm (catching swimmer Erin Reilly yawning in the pool: “Are we keeping you up there, Erin?”), and invariably accompanied by the McKeever sign-off, a rising, request-for-confirmation-but-not-quitea- question “OK?” As in: “You’re going to do the vertical strokes, OK?” (Swimmers treading water, nodding.) “Come up, somersault, OK?” (More treading, more nodding.) “Build into a race-quality finish. Go on the top. OK?” (Nodding, followed by splashing.)

McKeever was an All-American swimmer at USC, so she understands the physical part of the sport. But her coaching strategy involves much more translation and teaching than “do-as-Idid” bluster. It’s a skill and a way of coaching that she learned early on.

When McKeever was four, a drunk driver smashed into her father’s car as he drove home from work. Mike McKeever went into a coma and died nearly two years later, leaving his wife, Judy Primrose, and three children. Primrose, a former youth swimming champion, remarried and had seven more kids. As the oldest, Teri became a second mother to her siblings. In her limited free time, she swam in the backyard pool. Because she didn’t have time to do endless swims, it was critical when she had her mom’s attention to go at race speed and to work on technique—body posture, starts, turns, and breaths.

Now McKeever is known as a coach who mothers her swimmers, who coaches them on their personal lives, and who focuses on happiness outside the pool, and technique and perfection in it. She allows all her swimmers a day off in the middle of the week and forces them to get out and surf or explore San Francisco. She doesn’t demand 10,000 meters a day, as many coaches do, and she makes workouts more interesting by mixing them with things like dance classes, spin classes, yoga, and Pilates.

But when her swimmers are in the pool, McKeever expects them to go hard and go flawlessly. “It’s amazing how the fundamentals of how you do it are kind of ignored over how much did you do it,” she says.

Renowned Australia-based swim coach Milt Nelms, who tutors swimmers internationally on the finer points of stroke technique, says that McKeever’s swimmers work just as hard as swimmers going much farther, because they actually have to think about what they’re doing. “They work harder because they have to be engaged to do this stuff,” he says, sitting on the bleachers at the Berkeley Aquatics Center after watching the team work out. “If you’re engaged, you’re into what you’re doing and getting better, not thinking about your little lunch break between laps.”

Nelms works with the Cal swimmers when he gets a chance, but not with any other collegiate programs—because, he says, there are so few coaches with McKeever’s teaching ability. Shaking his head at what he calls a “training culture” that cares only for how far you swim, Nelms says McKeever stands out for her willingness to consider what she’s teaching and why she’s teaching it.

“In the world of swimming,” Nelms says, “Teri is a bright spot.”

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