By Kelli Anderson
Stanford Magazine

[Excerpted with permission from Stanford magazine, published by Stanford Alumni Association, Stanford University.]

If you go to a Stanford men’s swim meet this year and observe carefully, you will see all the Cardinal swimmers dressed in sleek Nike-issue sweat suits. All, that is, except for one member of the team who wears red sweatpants that date to the Johnson administration. At a meet some time ago, a Nike representative noticed. He approached coach Skip Kenney and demanded an explanation. Here it is, in long form.

The first thing you need to know about Skip Kenney, the 63-year-old coach of the Stanford men’s swim team, is that he never swam competitively. Since he arrived at Stanford in 1979, Kenney has won seven NCAA titles, coached 100 different All-Americans, served on three Olympic staffs and won an astonishing 25 Pac-10 titles in a row. A generation-spanning community of swimmers and former swimmers would all “lie down in traffic for him,” according to one, Adam Messner, ’01. But he has never swum a 3000 for time, never churned out 100 kicks on 90-second intervals, never spent so much as an hour with his face in the water, staring at the black line. “I can’t even imagine,” he says.

The second thing you need to know about Kenney is that . . . Visit Stanford magazine for full story.