For most of its existence, the North Baltimore Aquatic Club was associated with female swimmers driven to Olympic gold by a taskmaster coach.
The NBAC's deepest roots, however, involve boys, one who nearly drowned in the stream that bisects Baltimore and another playing alongside it at Meadowbrook, one of the city's favorite summer haunts.
Now another has grown into a young man reaching for history at the 2004 Olympics.
No swimmer has had as long an uninterrupted run with the NBAC as Michael Phelps. That's evidence of the merits of the program, a changing sport and the unrelenting standards of the man who has been there since Day One.
Founded in 1968, the NBAC has grown from a team without a home into a rarity. Murray Stephens, the head coach, owns its base of operations, the Meadowbrook Aquatic & Fitness Center. His team and facility were built on persistence, sweat and little small talk.
Stephens taught his heir apparent that the more important a competition, the more serene a coach must be. Bob Bowman reminded Stephens that post-collegians exposed to the outside world wouldn't necessarily infect the NBAC's ethos.
With 220 members at Meadowbrook and its satellite teams in Harford County and York, Pa., the NBAC isn't the biggest swim team in the region. Ones in Columbia and Towson have similar numbers, and behemoths in the Washington area are nearly five times as large. Other teams in the United States have mined more Olympic gold.
None, however, offers the rigor and scope that could develop dozens of national age-group record-setters, five Olympians and one who is the fastest all-around swimmer ever.
"The attitude is different here," said Marianne Limpert, who in September came to Baltimore to better her shot at becoming Canada's first four-time Olympic swimmer. "I wore a Speedo cap to my first workout. I was told, `The pro shop's over there. You need to get one of our caps.' I had to get with the program."
Limpert is 31, old by swimming standards, but not as old as the NBAC.
The NBAC way
The NBAC was turning out Olympic gold medalists before Phelps, 18, was born, and people have been cooling off at Meadowbrook since the Great Depression.
The complex in Mount Washington is at the core of a fitness enclave that includes bike shops, an ice rink and an organic grocery, but that zeitgeist isn't new. When Meadowbrook's first pool was poured in 1930, just west of the Jones Falls stream, Norris Field was a hot spot in the lacrosse world.
