Despite Singapore Adversity, Greg Meehan Sees Possibilities from First Summer with USA Swimming
When the United States swim team landed in Singapore in July, already feeling the early waves of an illness that would ravage the squad, Greg Meehan saw the World Aquatics Championships going one of two ways.
Acute gastroenteritis took the best-case scenarios off the table. The team he was leading for the first time as national team managing director could swim to the level of their physical strength, severely reduced as it was. Or they could find a way to wring out some of the success that they had envisioned before staging camp in Thailand.
The circumstances weren’t what Meehan would’ve preferred for his first senior international meet in his position. But finishing atop the medal table and leading the way in gold medals marked the best of a bad situation.
“At the end of the day, on the ground, what that team went through, how they stayed positive, how they supported each other, how they persevered, was really inspiring,” Meehan said last week in a wide-ranging interview with Swimming World. “You’re halfway through the meet and you’re like, geez, they have gone through the wringer. And obviously it hit some worse than others. But it didn’t bog them down. They stayed positive, they focused on controllables, and then they put their best foot forward. And so culturally, I feel like we’re in a really good place.”
Such a rubric is necessary given the challenges in Singapore. Meehan admits the illness confounds most attempts to evaluate any individual performance. But the aggregate of the team’s resilience is a significant data point about the mentality that he and the new coaching hierarchy at USA Swimming hope to mold on the way to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
Worlds was one facet of a busy summer, the first season of a normal-again Olympic quadrennial after the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics created two abnormal Olympic cycles. There’s more to like from a performance standpoint the wider Meehan zooms out, which will be reflected in a roster for the 2026 Pan Pacific Championships that includes swimmers who represented the U.S. at Worlds, World University Games and the World Junior Championships this year.
But the more important takeaway for Meehan is in laying the cultural foundation for a home Olympics. That’s what lured him to the job from Palo Alto and to the job. And it’s what he saw shine brightest this summer, especially amid the adversity in Singapore.
What’s ‘Tangible’ In the Pool
There’s little that Meehan and his staff can take away from Singapore in terms of swims. The U.S. was hit with waves of illness after their staging camp in Thailand that delayed the travel of some athletes to the meet. Some were affected early, some late. Some seemed to turn a corner only to be plunged back into symptoms and physical weakness.
It’s difficult for Meehan to evaluate any swimmer’s overall meet, since they were at very different physical places on most days. He’s instead evaluating each performance in a vacuum, measuring each individual’s swims against their physical state on that day.
But in aggregate, the U.S. winning nine gold medals, 11 silver and nine bronze for a table-topping 29 total medals is reflective of something that went right.
“I think if I pull back the lens and just look from a performance perspective, it’s a little difficult to have a true evaluation,” he said. “At the end of the day, we walked away winning the medal count, winning the gold medal count, winning more gold medals than we did in Fukuoka (in 2023). There are some tangible things that you can take away, even through all of the incredible challenges that the team faced.”
Meehan said the delegation came away with not just medals but concrete lessons. That includes logistical, process-oriented tweaks about things like staging locations, travel and attempts to tamp down on disease spread. Meehan would’ve had an eye on fine-tuning those aspects in some form even if the circumstances in Singapore weren’t so dire and public. He said he returned with a “book of a million notes” that reflects the 360-deggree remit of his job.
The process includes Meehan’s staff – senior manager and national team coach Kim Williams, who was with Meehan in Singapore; national team senior director Yuri Suguiyama, who led the World University Games delegation; as well as national junior team director Brendan Hansen. It will prominently feature input from athletes, particularly those on trips this summer. Once the national team and junior national team for 2025-26 are announced this month, it will include the coaches training those athletes daily.
“I think it’s really important that that we are self-critical at the end of a season,” Meehan said. “Individually, in our messages to the athletes, what are things that you did really well? Where are areas that you can be better, whether it’s training camp, competition or throughout the course of the year? We do that internally, between Yuri and Kim and Brendan and myself. We’ve had a ton of conversations about how we’re operating as a national team, the strategic planning. I’ve had opinions about this for some time, and I’m in a role now where there’s a little bit more impact on that.”
Widening the lens
While World Championships was the most prominent meet of the summer, it wasn’t the only one to which the U.S. sent teams. The performance in Singapore shouldn’t blot out promising developments elsewhere.
The U.S. won 27 of 42 gold medals at the World University Games in Germany in July, taking home 50 total medals. The country closest to them in golds had three, the nearest in the overall medal table at 15. It included a clean sweep of eight relays, four in meet-record times.
The U.S. topped the medal table at the World Junior Championships, with 10 gold and 22 total medals. All 10 gold medals were on the girls’ side, the boys contributing just four bronze medals in continuing a theme seen at the senior levels.
The depth on the women’s side is among the great takeaways of the summer for Meehan. Where once the U.S. had versatile stars on the men’s side and specialists on the women’s side, he sees the pendulum swinging the other way. The broad dominion of female swimmers like Kate Douglass, Gretchen Walsh, Torri Huske and Regan Smith (and younger swimmers like Leah Shackley, Audrey Derivaux and Rylee Erisman) over multiple strokes and distances is akin to what Ryan Lochte and Michael Phelps once did, although none of these women has displayed the same level of international dominance. The men’s side is trending toward specialists, like Luca Urlando in the 200 fly or Jack Alexy in sprint free. It’s a different kind of medal threat.
That requires a slight shift in expectations, Meehan said. It also requires shifts in strategy. He admitted that the recent incidence of swimmers (particularly on the men’s side) failing to quality out of prelims at major meets requires recalibration. He cites the mid-meet adjustment in Singapore – after failing to reach the final of the mixed medley relay, the U.S. leaned heavily on Alexy for prelims of the men’s medley relay, which led to bronze – as evidence of reading and reacting to changes.
There’s a lot of dimensions along which Meehan is evaluating ways to change and improve. And he’s ready and eager to tackle all of them.
“Those are things that we are constantly thinking about,” he said. “If nothing else, we will not be under prepared and we won’t be caught off-guard. There are some big-picture decisions that we’re making sure we’re looking at through a coach’s lens and having those conversations with steering committee and having those conversations with the elite coaches to make sure that we’re all in lockstep on what is best for the performance of Team USA.”
Last summer’s ‘bummer’
In at least one crucial way, Meehan took from Singapore something that he felt was lacking at the Paris Olympics a summer earlier.
Meehan has been part of nearly a dozen U.S. international delegations, as a head coach or assistant coach, over the last two decades, including on staff at the Paris Games as Huske’s coach. He walked away from that meet thrilled that the Stanford swimmer pocketed three gold and six total medals.
But he left Paris, “feeling a little bit bummed about where we were culturally” as an American delegation. That was part of what enticed him to give up a good job at Stanford in April to be part of USA Swimming’s build toward a home Olympics.
“I still walked away feeling like, we’re not maybe heading in the right direction.” Meehan said of last summer. “And there isn’t a single reason and there isn’t a single person responsible for that. I just pulled back the lens and like, OK, how can this get better? And that’s why I’m in this role. I had a great job, coaching one of the premier women’s programs in the country at one of the leading institutions in the world. I loved it, and it was hard to walk away from that, but that’s how passionately I feel about USA Swimming and helping us get better.”
How the U.S. team handled criticism from the outside is perhaps one reflection of that. As the U.S. struggled early in the meet, criticism aimed at USA Swimming from Rowdy Gaines, Phelps and Lochte led to sniping back from swimmers in the camp. It bred a defiance in the group, one of many sources of adversity that Meehan felt they handled in stride.
“Everyone is entitled to an opinion, both externally and internally. But I think what they did internally is we kept our focus where it needed to be, which was on the racing that was still ahead of us,” he said. “There’s always going to be noise, and it doesn’t really matter whether they agree with the noise or not. We’re there to perform. And so staying focused on what was right in front of them, I think they did a really good job of that, one day to the next.”
As Meehan looks forward from Singapore, there’s a sense of what could’ve been. He believes that a significant performance could’ve been in the cards had everyone stayed healthy, while understanding there’s no way to quite prove that.
But much like the mindset on arrival in Singapore, there’s a breakdown along the lines of what can and can’t be controlled. If the U.S. was destined by circumstance to find itself wondering what could’ve been at a major international meet, better for it to be at the beginning of an Olympic quad, not one year out at the Budapest World Championships in 2027 or at the Los Angeles Games.
Meehan’s job in the next three years is to both broaden the range of controllables for the team and arm them to handle the inevitable challenges that can’t be controlled.
“We still won this summer, even with all of the challenges,” he said. “So what could we do? What can we do next summer? What can we do in Budapest? And then what can we do in LA? That’s our focus.”
