Watch: Team USA Coaches Press Conference

2016 U.S. OLYMPIC TRIALS

• Sunday, June 26 – Sunday, July 3, 2016
• CenturyLink Center, Omaha, Nebraska
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• NBC Broadcast Schedule

National Team Director Frank Busch, Head Women’s Coach Dave Marsh, and Head Men’s Coach Bob Bowman answered questions from the press on the last day of the 2016 U.S. Olympic Trials.  The three leaders of Team USA’s Rio squad spoke for over 30 minutes, and you can watch the full video above, or click the link below to read the full transcript, but here are a few of things that we thought were most important:

Team Stats

• Despite the feeling that there are a lot more new faces on the team this year than normal, Busch said that there were 29 first-time Olympians this year, as opposed to 28 in 2012.
• The average age for the men is 23.9.
• The average age for the women is 22.3.

Relays

• The whole coaching staff will get together and decide relays, subject to rule constraints (e.g., relay-only swimmers must swim prelims or finals).
• “We’re going to see how people are training, if people want to do time trials, they can, and if they don’t, they don’t have to, and we can kind judge where we think people are” (Bowman).
• I think that’s our own only goal, to put a relay together that wins a gold medal. If that happens to have Michael on it, that is fine, if it doesn’t, that is fine as well. I’m not here to promote Michael’s agenda. He has plenty of relay medals. We want our relays to win, and we want the four people on there who will do the job (Bowman).
• “We had some rough relays last summer, and we have to put our people on the relays that would get us in the finals” (Marsh).
• “The world, especially the men’s side, 400 Free Relay and 800 Free Relay, Medley, they’re putting their “A” players in the morning swims now. Our first job is to get in the finals, because if you are going to win a gold medal, or any medal, you have to be in the finals to do that, and so we will be working on that” (Marsh).
• “First meeting with the coaches today, I just said, if you have any guys like Anthony Ervin, in my case, that hasn’t done a relay start in a long time, do a lot of relay starts in the next few weeks, please, so we can get comfortable with that” (Marsh).

Other Highlights:

• The press conference began with an announcement of the assistant coaches for the team.
• Busch indicated that he was not worried about having the Games in Rio and that “Team USA is excited to go.”
• Bowman: “One of the things that we have always done well, better than anyone else, is improve from the Trials to the Games, and I’m confident we’re going to do that again.”
• The coaching staff is confident that having Trials close to the Olympics is an advantage for the USA.
• Bowman said he thought the Phelps’s “times this week were mediocre,” and that Bowman has a plan for Phelps, although he declined to go into specifics.
• During the training camps, there is a plan to progressively move training cycles back later in the day to help deal with the late start time of finals.  Bowman: “If you look at physiology, when you are younger your body temperature keeps rising until it reaches a peak about midnight. That’s why they stay up late so much.”
• There are some plans for swimmers with families (e.g., Dana Vollmer and Michael Phelps) to be able to have their families around during the first camp, but not later.

Read the full transcript here.