How Dressel, Berkoff, and Douglass Broke Records at U.S. Short Course Trials

USA Swimming staged its first dedicated 25-meter World Championship Trials at the FMC Natatorium in Westmont this week to pick the roster for December’s Short Course World Championships at the Water Cube in Beijing. I tagged all three finals frame by frame in MakoVision from USA Swimming’s YouTube broadcast the morning after the session.

Westmont was only the second time Dressel had raced a short-course 100 IM since the 2021 International Swimming League finale. Now 30 and back home in Jacksonville training under his former Florida sprint coach Steve Jungbluth at Sporting JAX Aquatic Club, he swam the medley as his third final in under two hours. Earlier in the session he missed a Worlds spot in the 100 butterfly by a hundredth and edged Jack Alexy by two hundredths to win the 50 freestyle in 20.57. Twenty minutes after that 50 free, he took down Shaine Casas’s U.S. Open record of 50.45 and beat runner-up Grant House (51.33) by nearly a full second.

Against his own 49.28 world record from Budapest in 2020, the story is the front half: Dressel turned at 50 meters in 22.37, 0.12 faster than the 22.49 he went out in for his world record and 0.21 clear of Casas’s 22.58 pace from last autumn in the same pool. All of the gap to his 2020 swim came on the breaststroke and freestyle lengths, where he closed in 27.97 compared with 26.79 in Budapest.

Backstroke is the leg where Dressel usually has to hide in a medley, and in a 25-meter tank he hides underwater. Eight dolphin kicks carry him to 14.0 meters at 2.18 meters per second before he takes an arm pull, so only 11 meters and 10 strokes of surface backstroke remain to the wall. Across the whole race he stays submerged for 23.80 seconds and 50.8 meters. Half the 100 IM is over before his head breaks the water.

The best piece of skill in the race is his back-to-breast crossover turn at the 50-meter wall. When his left hand plants on the pad, he lets the elbow bend slightly to absorb his speed into the wall, then snaps off that hand to drive his rotation into a 12.7-meter breaststroke pullout. People forget he once held the American record in the 100-yard breaststroke at 50.03. Where the third final of the night finally catches him is the freestyle wall: his last underwater cuts short at 9.8 meters after five kicks, and he has to muscle through 13 surface strokes to get home.

If you are teaching an age-grouper how to do a backstroke start, show them the first 30 seconds of this clip. In set position, Berkoff pulls her hips high with a flat back. At the signal, her hands push off the bar and her head tips back while her legs drive horizontally into the pad instead of jumping upward. She clears the water in 0.13 seconds of flight time and slips in through a single hole at 2.1 meters before kicking out to 14.3 meters at 2.28 meters per second.

Even in a world record, she left time on the turn approach. Over the last five meters into the 25-meter wall (3.00 seconds, down from 2.80 in mid-pool), Berkoff flattens out and looks forward at the cross, which drops her speed from 1.79 to 1.67 meters per second. Claire Curzan pulls nearly even on the flip. Berkoff wins the race back off the wall with a 13.1-meter underwater and 12 strokes home before she lunges into a final butterfly kick at the pad. She catches the wall clean on the lunge, though I would still tell younger swimmers to copy Curzan’s straight-line finish in the next lane over rather than gamble on a fly kick in a tight touch.

Berkoff, 25, who trains under Braden Holloway in the NC State pro group, clipped two hundredths off Regan Smith’s 2024 world record of 25.23 and needed all of it to hold off Curzan at 25.26, the fourth-fastest swim in history. Both women entered October tied for sixth on the all-time performers list at 25.43. Berkoff swam 25.50 in morning prelims and took another 0.29 off at night for her first individual world record.

Before NC State, she grew up swimming at Missoula Aquatic Club in Montana for her father, David Berkoff. At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, he dolphin-kicked roughly 35 meters underwater off the start to set a world record of 54.51 in the 100 backstroke prelims. FINA capped backstroke submergence at 10 meters right after Seoul and moved the mark to 15 meters in 1991. Thirty-eight years after the Berkoff Blastoff forced that rule into the book, his daughter broke her first world record by surfacing at 14.3 meters, one kick inside the tape her father put on the rope.

Fifteen minutes before the 50 freestyle final, Douglass, 24, was still in the water for the 200 breaststroke. She went out under her own world-record pace and won by more than four seconds in 2:14.12, the fifth-fastest performance in history; she owns the other four too. From the medal stand she walked back behind the blocks, lined up next to Virginia training partner Gretchen Walsh, and touched in 22.75 to match Walsh’s world record. Walsh took second in 22.99.

Two weeks earlier at Coach Todd DeSorbo’s pool in Charlottesville, Douglass had broken the U.S. Open record in 22.94, only for Walsh to take the world record down to 22.75 later that same day. In Westmont, Douglass went 22.87 in prelims to pass Ranomi Kromowidjojo (22.93) as the second-fastest performer ever, then caught Walsh at night. Put alongside her 23.19 long-course world record from Irvine this summer, she now holds the 50 freestyle world mark in both 50-meter and 25-meter pools at once, and the two Cavaliers own the five fastest short-course swims in history.

Off the start, Douglass doesn’t shorten her kick to chase tempo. She holds a full dolphin kick through all nine beats at 2.57 meters per second to the breakout, then takes eight no-breath strokes on the opening length. Every time her lead hand spears forward on entry, her hips and shoulders snap through together as the back hand finishes past her hip, with the beat of her kick locked to the rotation.

She breaks the race open between 25 and 40 meters, taking 11 kicks over 5.97 seconds off the turn to reach 13.5 meters and surface in clean water ahead of Walsh. Her distance per cycle lengthens on the way home, from 2.24 meters to 2.30 across nine strokes into the pad. If she and Walsh both hit Beijing on a full taper in December, 22.75 probably will not survive the final.