It started simply enough. Kate Douglass was an elite national swimming recruit from New York who decided to take a recruiting trip to Virginia, attracted by the academics and the energy of the new head coach, Todd DeSorbo. It was her junior year of high school, in 2018, and DeSorbo’s first season leading the Cavaliers.
“He was selling being the one who would help UVA win its first national championship,” Douglass tells Sports Illustrated.
That seemed grandiose at the time. Virginia was a Top 10 program, but far removed from the power programs clustered at the top of the sport: Stanford, California and a rotating cast of Michigan, Texas, Texas A&M and Louisville. Breaking through that ceiling was a daunting proposition…