Teri McKeever's Historic Challenge

Teri McKeever, the first American woman ever named to be an Olympic swim team coach, is surrounded by doubters. Nobody questions McKeever's credentials. They speak eloquently for themselves. It's the "first'' part they can't believe.

"I think females are 65 percent of the registered swimmers in (USA) Swimming,'' she said. "You should check that out.''

The official figures: 60.4 percent of swimmers are female. The number is 46.7 percent of registered coaches. Few of the women coaches, however, reach the pinnacle, working at Division I colleges or elite clubs. McKeever suspects that most of them have to back away from the job when they want to build families. The sport can be as chaotic and demanding as football, minus the weighty paycheck.

"People always say that in this job, you really need a wife,'' McKeever said, her voice landing emphatically and comically on the last word. Her recruiting skills can't help her there.

A follow-up question came out slowly, carefully. Would she mind explaining the state of her personal life?

"That's easy,'' she replied immediately, laughing. "I don't have a personal life.''

McKeever, 42, has been the Cal women's coach for 12 years, running one of the top college teams in the country and, for the last four years, training the best American female swimmer, Natalie Coughlin. The two of them are going to Athens together, Coughlin to compete in two individual events, McKeever to make long-overdue history.

As a recruiter, McKeever has come across athletes who chose Cal because they wanted a female coach. She has also encountered the opposite. One young woman who did pick Cal eventually told McKeever that she couldn't accept a female authority figure.

"She was having a hard time with me being a woman and telling her what to do,'' McKeever said. "Needless to say, she didn't last long.''

Just as she followed her mother into the pool, McKeever always expected to become a parent someday. She thought she would teach high school after she graduated, but she became an assistant coach at USC, and just kept going.

McKeever can never be sure when her coaching style is feminine and when it is just Teri McKeever. Coughlin has said several times that going to Cal and swimming for McKeever revived her love for the sport, which vanished after a torn shoulder muscle kept her from qualifying for the Sydney Olympics.

The two of them are at the Olympic training camp at Stanford now, preparing to leave for Europe and teasing people who ask Coughlin to sign Cardinal paraphernalia. At the beginning of camp, McKeever asked Schubert if she could arrange a little bonding ritual. He agreed, and the swimmers were told to introduce themselves and then point out a scar and say how they got it.

Is that something one of the men would have suggested? She's not sure. But an all-male staff is bound to be limited, and the sport overall is missing something if, even for personal reasons, women don't hold leadership roles.

At Cal, McKeever tries to balance her staff by having a male assistant. She wants to learn how to balance her life, too, in spite of how attentive she must be to her swimmers. That would be another first, a victory that won't show up in a headline but will push her sport forward yet again.