In First Fall on Job, Greg Meehan Redefining Role of USA Swimming Coaches
Part of the appeal for USA Swimming in hiring Greg Meehan, beyond the three national championships and slew of Olympians mentored, was his familiarity with what a coach needs. His 13 seasons at Stanford required an expansive view of the program, of athletes on different timelines, of prepping for the present and the future.
As USA Swimming’s National Team Director, the scope of Meehan’s job is even broader. At the conclusion of his first half-season on the job, his experience of being one of the coaches that he now has to interface with is even more significant.
The conclusion of a busy summer in the first year of the Olympic quad is a natural recalibration point for Meehan, hired in April. He spent his first summer on the job gauging the depth of the talent pool by watching performances at the World Aquatics Championships, World Junior Championships and World University Games. With no selection meet next summer ahead of the 2026 Pan Pacific Championships, swimmers will have an extended training block through the spring.
By that time, Meehan and his staff will have a better idea how USA Swimming’s national team staff and the high-profile training groups around the country can work together in aligning the program’s sights on the 2028 Olympics.
“I think right now it is more internally within the national team division, what do we need to do better? What are the services that we can dive into?,” Meehan said last week in an interview with Swimming World, adding that the goal for his staff is, “really trying to help support those coaches and athletes and finding the things that we can assist them with.”
This summer has been about assessing strengths and weaknesses. The experience in Singapore, where the U.S. persevered through a severe bout of gastroenteritis, brought Meehan and his staff many lessons. As a coach who relied heavily on data at Stanford, the lull in competition this fall is a chance to review the data and glean more insights.
Meehan knows from being on the other side of the table what he doesn’t want to do in this process. When national team rosters are released this month, he won’t show up in the offices of coaches with significant populations on the team and start dictating changes. He also won’t walk into meetings with nothing to offer.
“As a coach, it always drove me nuts when someone would walk in and be like, OK, how can I help you?,” he said. “No, that’s the worst question.”
Meehan knows that, as does a staff that includes former Wisconsin head coach Yuri Suguiyama and former Cal assistant Kim Williams. Instead, his goal is collaboration. With the time, data and freedom from day-to-day minutiae that can bog down a college staff, Meehan’s team can supply insights to college and club coaches about their athletes. They’ll also get more information about those swimmers from the coaches who see them every day as opposed to just a six-week summer snippet.
The hope is that together, they can triangulate the best path forward for athletes.
“We want to be partners in this,” Meehan said. “We want to be partners with coaches and athletes. We don’t want to tell them what to do. We don’t want to walk in and say, here’s a blank slate, how can we help you? Because that’s too much. We’re trying to narrow the focus on some tangible things, and whether that’s technical, race strategy, preparation, strength and conditioning, the whole 360, that’s our goal. And we have to continue to get to know those athletes before we can really dive into it.”
Meehan assumed his role before the job above him was filled, USA Swimming only hiring Kevin M. Ring as CEO last week. Ring’s expertise isn’t in swimming. He’s there to grow the membership and expand commercial opportunities.
Having the sporting side sorted out, then, is a boon for Ring in terms of where his attentions will be spent in the early weeks upon taking the office on Sept. 17.
“Greg is obviously an incredibly established coach, and I think having him in place, knowing the respect that people have for him, that’s something that I don’t think that I have to worry about in terms of people and staff,” Ring told Swimming World last week. “What I have to think about is, what does Greg need? What does Greg need to grow?”
Meehan likes the label of 360-degree thinking for his mission. That encompasses the day of the race, the week of the race, the month of the race and the months long before a race. It involves tweaks to race strategy exposed in Singapore and training adjustments in the lead up to a major event. (One concrete example of a big-picture change is moving the summer without a selection meet from 2027 to 2026, allowing direct selection to the 2027 World Championships in Budapest instead of Pan Pacs.)
As Meehan and his staff define their roles more solidly, the duties will include what to do in the months where there is no competition on the horizon. How does the U.S. staff find ways to contribute to, say, the training of Katie Ledecky in October when she won’t race for another two months? Or what insight can USA Swimming provide a young swimmer – a Rylee Erisman or a Thomas Heilman – to augment their daily work?
Meehan walked away from the 2024 Olympics in Paris “bummed” at the state of the U.S. program’s culture. He sees the resilience in Singapore the face of illness and external criticism, led by a group of veterans on the women’s side in particular, as indicative of change.
Meehan now has a chance to shape that culture. And before he and his staff do, they will spend time determining the best way to affect that change.
“There is that sort of intangible piece of culture building within USA Swimming,” he said. “That’s very important. It’s very important to me. I know it’s important for the staff. I know I feel that from the athletes. … That’s the piece that, as national team coaches, we can only have so much impact on things. But this is an area where we want to make sure everybody’s on the same page and we’re all working towards the same thing, and that’s getting back to being a dominant force.”
