Over the last few years, Stanford Women’s Head Coach Greg Meehan has created a culture that has not only attracted the attention of huge, and I mean HUGE, incoming talent, but also allowed for that talent to grow and flourish, which certainly isn’t always the case in college athletics.
In the last 2 years alone, we have seen 2 highly coveted high school seniors turned freshman, Simone Manuel and Ella Eastin, already coming into Stanford with very impressive resumes, both on the national and international level. It wasn’t certain they could get much faster, mostly because they were already so fast. But by the time their freshman campaign came to a close, they both turned heads at least 360 degrees with their earth shattering performances at NCAA’s, both of which included 1 individual american record.
This doesn’t just include the champs though. The list goes on. Lindsey Engel, Janet Hu, Ally Howe, and out-of-high-school Olympian Lia Neal. This group of girls (aside from Manuel) not only all had incredible individual performances this weekend at NCAA’s, but also rallied around a relay DQ as a team and came roaring back onto the scoreboards to end up a convincing 2nd place.
This isn’t just by accident. Greg absolutely knows what he’s doing, and has created a culture that his athletes have embraced 100% and now execute seamlessly. This Stanford team has insane talent, but that talent has also came to Stanford hungry for more, and put in the work to achieve it. I’d be on the look out for this team in years to come. I don’t see these girls going anywhere but up, and I also don’t see the additions of Simone and a certain distance savant hurting their training environment too badly.
For some reason this video reminded me to ask, is there going to be a Most Valuable Swimmers ranking coming out before Wednesday?
Greg is a great coach and an even better person, but this philosophy works for some and not for others (at Stanford or an school). Stanford also had stud frosh swim poorly this year. Kim Williams and Leah Stevens are two frosh who had subpar seasons for them. It is about being the right fit and more importantly, about the athlete decisions. But no different there than any of the top schools. If those two had swum up to their hype, the relay DQ or two wouldn’t have matter to their national championship dreams