Disgraced Cal swim coach publishing memoir as abuse lawsuit continues

FILE: U.S. Olympic team head coach Teri McKeever speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials, Sunday, June 24, 2012, in Omaha, Neb. (Charlie Neibergall/AP) Disgraced former Cal women's swimming coach Teri McKeever is writing a memoir that address the psychological abuse allegations that some of her former swimmers are suing the University of California Board of Regents over.

>McKeever, and by extension the Golden Bears swimming program, was once considered the paragon of the sport. Competing under her meant that a swimmer was among the best in the country, and the results followed. She won four NCAA team titles and is still the most successful female coach in swimming history; Cal even once described her as a "maker of Olympians." But that prestige came with a dark underbelly of psychological torment that went on for years, according to the accusations of dozens of swimmers that Cal spoke with before the school decided to fire her on Jan. 31, 2023. Orange County Register journalist Scott Reid broke the news on these allegations in a bombshell report published in 2022.

>Now, the former coach wants to tell her side of the story with a book titled, "From Podiums to Pariah." According to a blurb on her website, McKeever will, in fact, provide "her perspective on the accusations that ended her longtime college coaching career, and how the lessons she taught athletes helped her through what followed."

Natalie Coughlin's coach, Teri McKeever, talks to her before the finals of the women's 100-meter backstroke during the 36th Santa Clara International Swim Meet at the George Haines International Swim Center on June 28, 2003, in Santa Clara, Calif. (Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images)

Screenshot of Teri McKeever's website. (Screenshot via terimckeever.com)

Swimmer Missy Franklin describes how she's adjusted to life as a college student during a meeting with sportswriters at UC Berkeley on Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2013. (SF Chronicle/Getty Images) Currently, a group of 17 former swimmers is suing the UC Board of Regents for allegedly turning a blind eye to the bullying culture McKeever is accused of cultivating and for allowing the coach to keep her job despite the knowledge of the alleged circumstances. The group - originally 18 members until one plaintiff removed herself from the case in September - had its case dismissed in 2024, but an appeals court ruled in June that the case could move forward because the OC Register's original reporting reset the statute of limitations on the accusations.

>Karen Campbell, the lawyer who has represented this collective throughout that whole process, told SFGATE that she had only just found out about the book last week, when SFGATE first brought it to her attention. Campbell said the clients had had no comment on the book.After her side's appeals victory, Campbell is preparing to enter the discovery process for the case, which Campbell told SFGATE could take up to a full year from now.

>It isn't clear when the book will come out, as it is simply listed as "Coming Soon" on McKeever's website. But the book already has a cover mocked up and a listed co-author alongside McKeever: longtime swimming reporter Karen Crouse.

>Crouse was at one point a highly recognized sports journalist, most prominently reporting for the New York Times from 2005 to 2021, with a specific interest in the swimming world. Her time at the paper ended in controversy, though. In 2021, the Times suspended Crouse for failing to disclose an agreement to ghostwrite a book for 23-time Olympic gold medal winner Michael Phelps when she continued to report on Phelps. Crouse responded by resigning.

>Her Gray Lady tenure also included frequentinterviewswith, and referencesto, McKeever, sometimes alongside glowing praise for the decorated coach. In a 2008 story about women's coaches breaking barriers ahead of the Beijing Olympics, Crouse called the coach "a trailblazer on the training front," noting the innovations she brought to the workout regiments of her swimmers. She highlighted McKeever as one of the glass-ceiling-breakers in swimming as a woman coaching men in 2014. There's even an odder reference to her in a 2012 report that mentioned the coach's mom wanting her daughter to meet Roger Federer at the Olympic Village, and she obliged, "because he'd be nice looking."

Cal head coach Teri McKeever goes through a celebration tunnel made by the Arizona team to share in the spirit of good sportsmanship during the Division I Women's Swimming and Diving Championship in College Station, Texas. (NCAA Photos/Getty Images) Crouse is not the only reporter to have written positively about a woman with abuse allegations that span decades. Those accusations only became public the year after Crouse resigned from the Times, and the frequency of coverage was a natural end product of McKeever's success as a coach. But unlike other reporters, Crouse's stories about, or mentioning, McKeever were of a former college teammate and sorority sister at the University of Southern California. Though it's not disclosed in any of the New York Times articles that SFGATE reviewed, Crouse - who attended USC from 1980 to 1984, according to her LinkedIn page - was a teammate of McKeever's on the Trojans' women's swim team, as McKeever swam at the school from 1980 to 1983, and the two were also members of the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority.

>Crouse's most recent journalistic venture has been to join "Sport & State," the editorial brainchild of conservative sports commentator Clay Travis. In one of her blogs, she says public figures can have headlines about them "twisted by others to devastating effect," and that her editorial goals for the site are to "shine a light on an example or two of people punished by those who projected onto them their own insecurities, prejudices and weaknesses." It's a common right-wing trope of whinging about cancel culture, although these excerpts manage to avoid saying the two magic words.

Teri McKeever of the California Bears reacts after a race at the 2019 Division I Women's Championship on March 23, 2019, in Austin, Texas. (Justin Casterline/Getty Images)

U.S. Olympic swimmer Natalie Coughlin, left, displays the five medals she won competing in the Athens Olympics as her coach Teri McKeever, right, sits next to her on the campus of UC Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif., on Wednesday, Sept. 1, 2004. (AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez) In another blog, she harkens back to her days at the Times when an editor suggested finding fewer "damsel in distress" narratives, which caused her to reflect on how her stories about female athletes included dark topics like "abusive coaches" and "suicidal ideation," among others. She then notes that, ultimately, the story she published after the conversation, one about the eating disorder of figure skater Gracie Gold, was one of the sports section's most read stories of the year. The lesson she learned was, as she put it, "Distressed damsels pique the public's interest." (The thesis of the blog this appears in is that the WNBA's leap in viewership is because of outrage-hunting fans of off-court drama, uninterested in on-court performance or clean sportsmanship).

>On Dec. 28, 2023, the U.S. Center for Safe Sport suspended McKeever for three months and placed her on probation for 12 months following an investigation into her tenure at Cal. Part of the former coach's agreement with Safe Sport included an admission that she emotionally and physically abused swimmers under her watch for over 20 years, according to a report from the OC Register. Her reputation is no longer that of the Olympic coaching hero who helped usher in a golden age of American swimming success. Instead, she's a "pariah" whose success was built on the backs of swimmers she allegedly tormented for decades.

>In other words, Crouse has found her new damsel in distress to write about.

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>This article originally published at Disgraced Cal swim coach publishing memoir as abuse lawsuit continues.