Olympic Champion, BC Head Coach Dara Torres Trains NBA Champion Jaylen Brown In the Pool

The NBA offseason gives players the opportunity to continue practicing while still taking time for themselves away from the sport. In the case of NBA Champion and 2024 NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Jaylen Brown of the Boston Celtics, he traded his jersey for a pair of goggles and trained under 12-time Olympic medalist and Boston College Head Coach Dara Torres.

In an interview with NBC Boston, Torres revealed that she got an email out of the blue from a man named Drew Moore, who is an athletic trainer and performance therapist for the 17-time NBA Champion franchise, asking if anybody would train one of their players.

Torres detailed the initial conversation between Moore and herself, saying “He didn’t say who it was. I wrote back and said I have time, I’m here, I’ll train whoever. Just let me know. And [they] still didn’t tell me until like the day before.”

That mysterious athlete was Jaylen Brown, the 2024 NBA finals MVP, and the player with the second-richest contract in the NBA, only behind his Celtics Teammate Jayson Tatum (per sportac.com).

The first session in the water took place at the Auerbach Center, the Celtics’ training facility, just two miles away from the campus of Boston College, in a small pool that Torres describes as being “two bodylengths of him, and that was it.”

Following that first training session, they ended up moving the workouts to the Campus of Boston College. Where Brown quickly began wanting more time in the water.

“We would schedule maybe two workouts. He’d [say] like ‘No I want to come again tomorrow and I want to come the next day,’ so it ended up being multiple workouts in a row,” Torres said.

Torres and her assistant coach Chris Morgan found that Brown had a very “analytical” approach to the practices.

“You’ll tell him to do something, he’ll take it in, he’ll process it, then once he thinks he has it in his head, then he’ll try it,” Torres said. “One of the things he had me do is he had me videotape him. I started videotaping a little, then it was like every single lap he wanted videotaped. He could see the mistakes that he made at the beginning and then the corrections that he made afterwards.”

The Celtics’ forward detailed his focus on the training at the Boston Celtics’ Media Day on September 29th.

“Trying to master like your efficiency, no wanted movement,” Brown said. Later adding “the better swimmer you are is like an analogy to life. No wasted movement, no drag, just get from point A to point B as easy as possible.”

Torres added: “He was there to do one thing, and it was to learn how to be more efficient, and to get a little bit more cardiovascular work. It was just such a pleasure to work with him and to work with an athlete like that who takes things in, you know, wants to learn and wants to make himself better.”

Torres was named the Head Coach of the Boston College Swimming and Diving program in June of 2024. In her first season at the helm, her women’s team finished 15th at the 2025 ACC Swimming and Diving Championships, while the men ended up 13th.

Torres’ 12 Olympic medals tie her with Jenny Thompson (USA) for 3rd most among all female swimmers in history. She also boasts another three Pan Pacific Championships golds, in addition to her one Pan American Games gold medal.