DeSorbo Breaks Down U.S. Olympic Staff Selection, Three Years in the Making

When it came time to select assistant coaches for their U.S. Olympic swimming staff, University of Virginia’s Todd DeSorbo and University of Florida’s Anthony Nesty were already experts on the topic.

As first-time Olympic assistant coaches at the postponed Tokyo edition in 2021, they shared visions of their hypothetical U.S. coaching staff while rooming together, half-jokingly just to pass the time. But those conversations continued the following summer, and they stopped seeming so theoretical after DeSorbo and Nesty served a successful stint as American head coaches at the 2022 World Championships in Budapest, Hungary.

Discussion three years in the making finally came to fruition after U.S. Olympic Trials last month as Carol Capitani (Texas), Dave Durden (Cal), Braden Holloway (NC State), Chris Lindauer (Notre Dame), Greg Meehan (Stanford), and Chris Plumb (Carmel Swim Club) were picked for Paris. Durden and Meehan were the men’s and women’s head coaches, respectively, at the Tokyo Olympics.

“We’ve been talking about it along with USA Swimming for quite some time,” DeSorbo said at a media session on Monday, right before he left for the first pre-Olympic training camp in Cary, North Carolina. “It’s been a lot more about staff dynamics than anything — trying to create a staff that’s just going to create a great environment for the athletes to thrive in, to have a good time in, to work hard in, and to help build a bond.

“It might not have been the most traditional way of picking a coaching staff, but we had in our mind a list of coaches that, assuming they put an athlete or two on the Olympic team, then these are the people that we would want to go with,” he continued. “It’s people that we trust, people that work really well with others, and can work well with a lot of different athletes and a lot of different personalities. It’s a little bit more about managing than it is coaching at this point — at this level, a lot of these athletes coach themselves.”

“I think the coaching staff that we have is just a great staff that we’ve worked with quite a few of them in the past at the last few Worlds,” DeSorbo added. “We get along really great. I think that the staff dynamic is just gonna create a great environment for the team to, again, have a good time and enjoy themselves because it’s the biggest stage for our sport. It’s the pinnacle of our sport, and there’s gonna be a lot of pressure and there’s gonna be a lot of stress. We want to try to relieve a little bit of that by providing an environment for them where they’re enjoying themselves, taking a little pressure off of them and just setting themselves up to be as successful as possible.”

Team USA has big goals for the Paris Olympics, which begin later this month. The Americans are aiming to top the medals table as well as the gold medal count this summer, which should be more challenging than usual going against stacked squads from Australia and China. One way DeSorbo will look to ease that pressure by encouraging coaches and swimmers alike to soak in the moment and remember they are fulfilling childhood dreams.

“I’m going to try to really impress upon them to just go back to when they were 10 and 12 and 8 years old or whatever, whenever they started swimming and they were dreaming about the Olympics,” said DeSorbo, who boasts five current UVA athletes headed to the Paris 2024 Olympics (Gretchen Walsh, Alex Walsh, Kate Douglass, Emma Weber, and South Africa’s Aimee Canny), one former (Paige Madden), and one future (Thomas Heilman). “And now that dream has come true. It’s an amazing accomplishment.

“I think that they’re so locked in on continuing to perform at a high level of the Olympics that they may have missed that kind of side of things. And I think that thinking about it that way will also take a little bit of pressure off. Not necessarily being content with having made the Olympic team, but certainly the goal was to go there and perform at a high level. But just to take a step back and really look at what it took to get there, but also the dream that they had as a young person that now has come to a realization. It’s pretty special.”

DeSorbo conceded that the U.S. has “a significant amount of ground to make up” in certain events before the pool swimming portion of the Paris Olympics kick off on July 27. But the four-time reigning NCAA champion coach of the Cavaliers also pointed to America’s track record of exceeding expectations at the Olympics.

“Historically, the U.S. has done the best job of any country in the world of being better at the Olympics and performing at a high level,” DeSorbo said. “I’m confident in the motivation and excitement and commitment of everybody, men and women on the team, that are prepared to do that and do some pretty special things. I think there’s a lot of examples over the years — Lesak’s comeback, the U.S. women, you know, beating the Germans in the 4×100 free relay way back — where we weren’t supposed to win, the U.S. finds a way to do that.”

The U.S. Olympic swimming team will spend the next 10 days at North Carolina’s Triangle Aquatic Center (TAC), where all personal coaches are invited to attend for the first five days. Not only does it give staff an opportunity to learn more about their athletes, but it can also serve as a launching point in the careers of other coaches who weren’t chosen for Paris.

“In 2016, when Ryan Held made the U.S. Olympic team, I was his coach and I had the ability to go to San Antonio with the Olympic team in 2016 before they went to Rio,” DeSorbo recalled. “it was probably, at that point in my career,  the coolest, most exciting, most fun experience of my career. It’s probably the moment where I was like, ‘This is what I want to be doing. I want to be coaching at this level.’ I was like, ‘My dream is to be a U.S. Olympic coach.’”

Once the first pre-Olympic training camp comes to a close on July 11, the U.S. Olympic swimming team will head to Croatia until July 22. Team USA will stay in the same hotel and use the same training facilities as its camp before the 2022 World Championships. The main difference is that it will be a true training camp instead of a “taper camp.”

“In Croatia, it’s gonna be a grind,” DeSorbo said. “We’re still just under four weeks away. It’s a long time before the meet starts. So it’s a true training camp and to be somewhere like Croatia definitely just takes the edge off a little bit of that grind.”

DeSorbo was also asked about the Chinese doping controversy from 2021 as well as Katie Ledecky swimming the 200 free individually. He said “there’s been hardly any discussion” about China, and that he couldn’t say yet whether Ledecky will swim the 200 free individually, even though he knew the answer already.