Greg Hansen: UA brings back 'tough cookie' Amanda Beard to add bite to struggling swim program

An ESPN “College GameDay” producer called Amanda Beard in November 2009 and asked if she would be the guest prognosticator at the Arizona-Oregon football game.

Not Jennie Finch, not Lute Olson, not Terry Francona or Annika Sorenstam, but Amanda Beard.

She had not won an Olympic swimming medal since 2004, but to ESPN, Beard’s name, image and likeness carried more punch than that of Francona, who had managed the Boston Red Sox to the 2008 World Series championship.

Beard agreed. The public microscope wouldn’t intimidate her.

She had been on late-night talk shows with David Letterman and Jay Leno, posed for Playboy magazine, filmed TV commercials for Budweiser, Red Bull, Speedo and Maytag. No swimmer except Michael Phelps got more attention at the 2004 Olympics than Beard, whose transcendent swimming career produced two gold, four silver and one bronze medal.

And, besides, Arizona had become the NCAA’s foremost swimming power, winning 2008 national championships in both men’s and women’s competitions, a run of excellence that began when Beard led the UA women’s team to its first Pac-10 championship in 2000.

It was a good fit. Beard aced her “GameDay” stage time with Kirk Herbstreit, Lee Corso and Chris Fowler.

Now, 14 years later, Beard answered an even more important phone call from Tucson. This time it was from Augie Busch, the UA swimming coach who since 2017 has been struggling to rebuild Arizona’s once-proud program to its glory days.

Busch asked Beard, now 41, married, the mother of two young children, if she would consider leaving her home in Gig Harbor, Washington, to return to her alma mater and help put the pieces back together.

Beard said yes.

She will join an impressive coaching staff that includes Arizona’s 2008 national champion swimmer Lara Jackson and 2008 assistant coach Roric Fink, who was re-recruited by Busch a year ago after a nine-year stint at Texas.

“There’s been some serious positive traction happening the last few months,” Busch said Tuesday. “It hasn’t been easy, but this thing is on the tracks now.”

Arizona isn’t new at hiring high-profile assistant coaches.

Track coach Fred Harvey recently acquired longtime Tucsonan Bernard Lagat, a five-time Olympian, as the school’s head cross country coach, a program in need of a total facelift.

Football coach Jedd Fisch hired College Football Hall of Famers Chuck Cecil and Ricky Hunley — perhaps the two leading football players in UA history — to help start the reconstruction of Arizona’s football program.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Arizona softball coach Caitlin Lowe recently dismissed pitching coach Taryne Mowatt-McKinney, who was the face of Arizona’s 2007 and 2008 Women’s College World Series championships.

But I get a vibe that Beard’s return to the UA will be a success if it is anywhere close to her first rebuilding project in Tucson, 2000-03.

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At 14, she became one of the emerging faces of American swimming at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. The 5-foot, 90-pound high school freshman from Irvine, California, won a gold and two silver medals in the breaststroke.

When UA coach Frank Busch, Augie’s father, began to recruit Beard three years later, she no longer had Olympics-level speed. She had grown eight inches and gained 30 pounds. The physiological changes to her body robbed her of her medal-winning flexibility in the pool. It was as if she had to start over learning the mechanics of world-class swimming.

Busch was patient. At the 2000 Olympic Trials in Indianapolis, Beard finished eighth in the semifinals of the 200 meter breaststroke. I was in Indianapolis for the Trials that summer and asked a USA Swimming officials if I could interview Beard, then a UA freshman.

“She finished eighth,” he said, as if there was no story and no chance.

Busch saw something much different.

“I don’t care about how fast she is, or was, or what she might do again,” he said. “I like the challenge of coaching her. It’s not about times, it’s about Amanda. She’s a tough cookie. I wouldn’t count her out.”

Incredibly, two days later, Beard came from 10 yards back to finish second and earn a spot at the 2000 Olympics.

“Take 1996 times 100,” she told me. “That’s how good I feel finishing second.”

That was the completion of a rebuild that few, if any, saw coming.

She won a bronze medal a month later in Australia, then went on to set a world record at the 2004 Athens Olympic, win a gold medal, pursue a UA degree in Retail and Consumer Sciences, open a swimming school in Tucson (Swim Like a Mom) and another in Gig Harbor (Beard Swim Co.).

She wrote a New York Times bestselling book, “In the Water They Can’t See You Cry: A Memoir,” and traveled the world as a motivational speaker.

Now, of all things, she’ll return to her alma mater to help her coach’s son dig out of a hole he inherited from two failed coaching regimes.

As Frank Busch said 23 years ago, Amanda Beard is a tough cookie. I wouldn’t count her or the UA out.

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