Team USA swimmer Noah Jaffe takes the torch for Carlsbad, Cal-Berkeley pipelines
At a minimum, it takes two to get a tradition going. This weekend, the lane is open for Noah Jaffe to supplement Staciana Stitts and start a swimmers’ CBS Club.
C is for Carlsbad, the San Diego suburb where Jaffe grew up and where Stitts attended high school a generation prior.
B is for Berkeley, home of the flagship University of California campus where Jaffe is coming off his freshman year and where Stitts made record-setting ripples at the dawn of this century.
And S is for Sydney, the Australian metropolis where Stitts peaked internationally between her first and second Golden Bear seasons. And where Jaffe is having his introduction to global competition as part of Team USA’s first Para swimming contingent at the Duel in the Pool — opposite McKenzie Coan, Jamal Hill, and Lizzi Smith.
Following a seven-year hiatus altogether, and a 15-year absence from the Southern Hemisphere, the Duel in the Pool returns to the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre (nee Sydney International Aquatic Centre) this Friday (Thursday stateside time) through Sunday. In so doing, it reverts to the original U.S.-Australia card last utilized the last time it took place Down Under. (In the interim, the Americans tested constellations of Europeans every odd-numbered year from 2009 to 2015.)
Team USA’s only Australia-bound Para swimmer who has yet to compete on the ultimate stage, Jaffe is studying biochemistry at Cal. The 18-year-old, who started competing at age eight and turned to the Para ranks at 14, represents the Golden Bears club program.
As his latest impression in extramural competition, Jaffe clocked in at an unprecedented 54 seconds to win the 100-yard freestyle at the 2019 California Para swimming state tournament. The pandemic preempted the championship’s next two editions, thus fast-forwarding his next potential splash to his first dip in overseas waters.
Those waters will constitute the same space where the last Carlsbad-raised, Berkeley-educated standout had her grandest athletic moment for the world to see.
Stitts was born in Columbus, Ohio, but later relocated and graduated from Carlsbad High School, where her father taught English, her mother chemistry, and where she is a Lancer Wall of Famer. As a Golden Bear, she set 100- and 200-meter breaststroke program records, helped her quartet to a 50-meter relay short-course world record, cracked three Pac-10 All-Academic rosters, and amassed 14 All-American accolades.
Six months after her top collegiate highlight — capturing the 200-meter relay title at the 2000 NCAA championships — she was credited with helping the U.S. 400-meter relay team to gold.
At the 2000 Olympic Games Sydney, Stitts and three other reserves got the Americans into the final by finishing their qualifying heat at 4:06.16, good for fourth place. From there, the first-string squad took over and logged a world-record three-minute, 58.30-second finish, edging the hosts by 3.29 ticks.
Stitts returned for three more years at Berkeley, where she sculpted an athletic department hall-of-fame resume, then had one more international rendezvous at the 2003 Pan American Games, where she triumphed in the medley and 100-meter breaststroke.
Jaffe has made no secret of his desire to make Sydney a springboard for higher-end journeys with Team USA. If he fulfills his top near-future goal with a passport to the 2024 Paralympic Games Paris, he will join ample company who share one or the other of the same hometown or higher-ed haven with him and Stitts.
Another Carlsbad athlete — albeit an adopted one who represents her native Australia — Michellie Jones, made swimming one-third of her career, and peaked when she garnered silver at the Sydney Olympics triathlon. Jones later participated in the 2016 Paralympic Games Rio, serving as a guide to PT5 gold medalist Katie Kelly.
In addition to Stitts, Cal’s coterie of Olympic alumni bears 25 other American medalist swimmers, including Nathan Adrian, Natalie Coughlin, and Missy Franklin. Decorated Olympians representing Canada, Croatia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Serbia, Slovenia, and Sweden have also studied and swam at Berkeley.
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One of Team USA’s long-course-meter debutantes this weekend, Linnea Mack may be starting to embody delayed gratification.
Born around the dusk of the millennial generation, Mack set her otherworldly tone in as a high-school freshman in March 2010, when she revised Coughlin’s 14-year-old Pacific Swimming 100-meter backstroke record. She won four straight MVP honors at San Jose’s Pioneer High School, then set three UCLA program records, and has since watched several Gen Z peers attain their Olympic break.
Erika Brown, Simone Manuel, and Abby Weitzel were all part of the bronze-caliber 100-meter relay team last summer. Brown won a silver in the 100-meter medley, as did Torri Huske. Weitzel previously nabbed a medley gold and freestyle silver in Rio, and Manuel owns an aggregate five medals from the past two Games.
To underscore her catching-up profile, Mack is the only one of the eight competitors from the women’s 100-meter freestyle at the 2020 Olympic trials without her own Wikipedia bio. She and Kate Douglass were the only two to miss the cut for Tokyo.
But she has been palpably present at the doorstep. Ahead of the 2020 trials, Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde declared her the dark horse to watch in that 100-meter freestyle heat. In the 50-meter freestyle, she finished fourth, the highest ranking not to yield a passport to Japan, and only 0.2 seconds behind first-place Manuel. Conversely, fifth-place Gretchen Walsh clocked in at 25.74, 1.25 ticks behind Mack.
Mack bounced back with a third straight impression in the International Swimming League. And last October, she won the 2021 FINA Swimming World Cup’s 100-meter butterfly in Budapest, Hungary, finishing at 56.77. Australian force Emma McKeon, an 11-time Olympic medalist and five-time gold-getter, won the same event in the World Cup’s Doha, Qatar, and Kazan, Russia, legs later that month.
