Cal’s Keaton Jones a surprise contender in backstroke

If the NBC cameras had caught footage of Keaton Jones’ parents when the results lit up on the scoreboard at the USA Swimming Olympic Trials last month, it wouldn’t have been pretty.

“I have to tell you, nobody really thought Keaton was going to make the team,” said his mom, Elizabeth Jones. “Luckily, nobody knew who we were. There was a lot of ugly crying and screaming. We would’ve embarrassed him.”

Jones, a 19-year-old freshman at Cal, wasn’t exactly a favorite to represent the United States at the Summer Olympics in Paris, which begin this month.

His last attempt at cracking the Olympic squad was in 2021, when he finished 43rd out of 45 swimmers in the 200-backstroke, his signature event. His time: 2:04.47.

This time around, he had the swim of his life, registering a 1:54.61 that was just 0.28 seconds behind Ryan Murphy, a four-time Olympic gold medalist. His second-place finish secured his spot in Paris this summer.

Murphy, 29, and Jones, nearly a decade younger, will give the United States two hopefuls at bringing home the gold for the United States in the 200-backstroke.

“When I was a 16-year-old kid and got put into a prelim heat with Murph (at trials in 2021), I was seeing him with his giant muscles, he was slapping his legs and I was scared,” Jones said. “I’m like, ‘God, I have to race this guy? We’re in the same pool?’

“This time it was different. I felt like I belonged.”

His journey wasn’t a straightforward one.

As a kid growing up in Wisconsin, Jones was “swimming before he could walk,” said his mom, but he just did it for fun. When it came to competitions, “he was never winning,” she said.

“He was 5 or 6 and he was so terrible,” said Elizabeth Jones. “He was not good. But he loved it. He had so much fun, made all these friends.”

He was the kind of kid who would cheer for his friends when they beat him in a race.

“He didn’t have a killer instinct,” she said. “But it spurred him to work really hard.”

The family moved to Phoenix and, because of the heat, Jones took up swimming full-time. He was improving until he turned 10, fell off the couch and broke his arm so badly it looked like he had two elbows (his parents still have the pictures).

It required multiple surgeries, with rods put in from his wrist to his elbow. Jones missed six months of swimming and was told he’d never regain full rotation of his arm again.

“Maybe backstroke is out for you,” his mom recalled the doctor saying.

Coincidentally, about that same time, there was a nearby Arizona State University swimmer, Alex Sherman, who suffered her own career-ending injury.

A former world champion when she was 10, Sherman was on the path to representing her native Romania at the Olympics one day when tragedy struck. She was hit by a car and came away with thoracic outlet syndrome in her shoulder. Her career was over.

But she wasn’t ready to leave the sport entirely. Someone suggested she try coaching. She immediately loved it. And in her second year on the job, she met Jones.

“I feel like we both grew together,” she said.

She saw a kid who was determined, who wanted it badly enough. He listened to everything she said.

“If I told him to do five push-ups before getting in the water, he wouldn’t even question it, he would just do it,” she said. “That’s the trust we had.”

Sherman was hard on him, but it seemed to work.

Each week, Sherman would ask the young swimmer how many of his practices were really good, and he answered honestly. Sherman placed him on a grading scale — below 50 percent was a failure.

“When she put that into perspective I was like, OK, I need to attack every workout,” he said. “That was huge for me. She prepared me so well.”

Said Sherman, “A few times he’d say, ‘No matter what I do, Alex is never happy.’ That hurt a bit. But it’s not that I wasn’t happy, it’s that I knew he could do more. He started to get it.”

Jones worked “harder than any kid I’ve ever coached,” she said. “And at the end of the day, hard work beats talent if talent doesn’t work hard.”

The fact Jones made it to those Olympic trials as a 16-year-old in 2021 was seen as a giant success, but with nerves on the biggest stage of his career, “he swam awfully,” his mom said. “Still, it gave him so much perspective on the sport.”

The lesson? He had to relax and enjoy himself. Too much pressure, too many nerves, and he would sink.

He made steady gains to get him to Cal, where longtime coach Dave Durden saw the same potential Sherman spotted years earlier.

Durden would get Jones in the pool alongside Murphy, the former Cal legend, and have them simulate competitive meets against each other on Saturday mornings. Over and over again, Jones was put to the test in the 200-meter backstroke. And he was making giant gains, studying his idol, Murphy, and eventually competing with him.

Six months ago, Jones caught a case of mononucleosis and couldn’t swim for weeks. He wondered if all his hard work was for nothing.

“It derailed him, but I told him, ‘Even before mono you were doing some incredible stuff,’” Durden said. “He may have not had the performances yet in the pool, but we have two world champions in Hugo Gonzalez and Ryan Murphy, and an American record holder, Destin Lasco, training next to him. You see what he was doing every day next to them and that doesn’t go away just because you have mono.”

Jones struggled to gain momentum after his illness, failing to record any top-eight finishes at the NCAA championships in April.