Frequent followers of the blog will notice that I only occasionally comment on the “hot” story of the moment. Even with that, I often wait until the dust settles for a few days before offering my reaction.
The news came down at the end of last week that Greg Meehan would be the next National Team Director for USA Swimming. I will offer my analysis of that hiring below, as well as discuss the now open Stanford Women’s position.
So that you don’t have to read all the way to get the general sense of how I feel, I am very positive on this hiring for USA Swimming. I have offered critiques of Meehan and USA Swimming in the past, but it’s hard for me to imagine a better hire at this particular moment. I will explain why. As for Stanford, rather than speculate on who will fill the position, I want to use the opening to discuss Stanford and where it stands in the college swimming environment.
Workhorse
That Meehan has arrived at this position is a testament to his work ethic. Climbing the coaching ladder means much more than having success in the pool. There are hidden requirements to fulfill, and consider yourself lucky if someone offers to show you what they are.
I think that the narrative of Meehan’s tenure at Stanford is often told backwards, partly owing to the simplistic way we often evaluate coaches. For shorthand we always go to the top peak result of a swimmer. or team In those terms, Meehan’s career peaked almost instantaneously during his time at Stanford, when he coached a collegiate team with Katie Ledecky, Simone Manuel and ripped off three consecutive NCAA Championships.
By the same criteria, you could view 2024 as a second peak with Torri Huske’s breakthrough in the Paris Olympic games. Beneath the surface however, I’d argue that Meehan is a considerably better coach (and better prepared for the role he has now) than he was when Stanford was three-peating.
There’s a humbling that comes for everyone after they reach certain heights. As it the swimming gods want to remind you that absolutely no hubris is tolerated. It’s probably not an understatement to say that the pandemic was lighter fluid on that humbling fire for Meehan.
In our profession, the level of difficulty does not get higher than trying to coach US Olympic hopefuls. Meehan had a roster about as full of them as you can get for a period of time. The probability that you will succeed in that environment is low by virtue of the sheer competitiveness.
There is a certain momentum that I see forming, a herd mentality with elite level swimming. A place becomes the “hot” place and swimmers flock there, until their comes a moment of inevitable disappointment. A coach is first overvalued and then almost instantaneously undervalued. In Meehan’s case, it appeared Stanford would never lose an NCAA Championship.
Then the pandemic, and on the other side you had Simone Manuel publicly saying she was overtrained going into the 2021 games, and the high profile departures of Claire Curzan and Regan Smith. All of a sudden it wasn’t inevitable.
What happened next is what I think makes Meehan excellent for the job he is just now embarking on. I want everyone reading this to imagine how they felt when a really good swimmer they coached left. Now try to imagine that swimmer was a gold medal winning, world record breaking talent. You probably can’t imagine it, I certainly can’t.
That had to hurt. The critiques (like the ones I launched) had to hurt. Through it all, Meehan maintained something that made me respect him above all: kindness. Swimming is a small world and no one would have blamed Meehan had he privately fumed. Instead he was gracious.
I think thick skin is overrated. It’s resistance to harm, but the best of the best go further than that. Meehan found a way to turn the hurt into improvement. He chose neither to believe the hype nor the critiques were actually who he was.
United States Swimming needs someone in the position of National Team Director that coaches can respect. Someone who can think strategically about the organization of high performance. I don’t think they could have done better than to hire Greg Meehan for this role.
What now for Stanford
On paper, the job that Meehan vacated is one of the absolute prime jobs in college swimming. However, color me shocked if it is filled by a “high” profile coach. Like I said, I don’t want to focus on the predictions, but more comment on what the opening tells us about Stanford and the model it applies to sports.
Stanford in many ways represents an old school form of collegiate athletics, and in many ways I respect that. They are staying true to the student-athlete model, and still want to be competitive at the very top.
In terms of their coach, in a bygone era almost no swim coaches were well paid in a general sense. There was an implied prestige in the position, and frankly we hadn’t found as many ways to maximize every moment for performance so the level of competition was lower.
The prestige was part of your compensation. You didn’t get paid well but you were the coach of STANFORD UNIVERSITY or YALE. or DUKE. That has changed in that many of the top NCAA coaches are by any standard well paid especially in reference to the cost of living.
Swimswam has reported that Stanford is offering a salary range between $160-195k a year for the position. For reference, it is probable that Pitt paid Chase Kreitler a starting salary of $175k three years ago to be their head coach.
By rough estimate of the cost of living, Kreitler’s purported salary equivalent in Palo Alto would be around $300,000. So in other words, Stanford is willing to pay at most 2/3 of what the University of Pittsburgh is willing to pay, albeit for a combined head coach vs a single gender coach.
The single biggest factor that impinges on a salary at Stanford is the cost of housing. It is true that Stanford has helped some of their coaches find housing, but I wouldn’t gather that there is a guarantee for the incoming coach.
It’s impossible to verify what I’m about to say, but I would venture that Meehan was not the first choice, or even among the first choices when he was hired. The fact that Stanford found a coach who could not only recruit but retain Olympic gold medal caliber swimmers for a period of time under this model in the recent past is actually quite lucky.
The previous few paragraphs may seem like i am talking down about Stanford, so let me sum up my opinion with this. I think the Stanford coach should get paid better. I am unlikely to influence that. In my ideal world, the coach would still try to fight for the values that are ever more dear in an increasingly mercenary NCAA.
I guess we’ll see what happens.