The Coaching Trio Behind Caeleb Dressel: Unique Collaboration Produced Stellar Results
In 2025, Caeleb Dressel raced sparingly and only in 50-meter events. He skipped U.S. Nationals as he and wife Meghan prepared for the birth of their second child, although Dressel did compete at USA Swimming’s Summer Championships in August. At the conclusion of that meet, Dressel began considering what it would take to make a legitimate run at a fourth Olympics in Los Angeles. That’s when he started reaching out to the individuals who would become his new team.
For a traditional swimming instructor, Dressel sought the guidance of Steve Jungbluth. More than a decade had passed since Jungbluth first met a high-school-aged Dressel interested in attending the University of Florida, and Jungbluth served as Dressel’s sprint coach with the Gators for eight years. That stretch corresponded with Dressel’s decimation of the NCAA record books and his rise to becoming the top swimmer in the world from 2017 through the Tokyo Olympics.
But by August 2025, Dressel was sure. Around the same time, he reached out to Keenan Robinson, the former Director of Sports Medicine and Science at USA Swimming and now the manager of recovery services for the NFL’s Cleveland Browns. “I basically just asked him, ‘Who’s left in the sport that you trust?’” Dressel said. Robinson recommended Sean Kao, his former intern at Arizona State University now running Aquatic Sport Performance in Southern California.
Finally, Dressel hired Slovakian-based physiologist Eva Piatrikova, with whom he connected through mutual friend and videographer Ryan Rosenbaum.
“When Caeleb decided to come back to swimming and put together his new team, he was looking for a scientist, and Ryan recommended me to Caeleb,” Piatrikova said. “Caeleb emailed me, we jumped on a call, and I’d like to say we clicked immediately. We share a similar view of the sport, and Caeleb has always been interested in pushing the sport to new levels.”
This trio had no pre-existing relationship, but they very quickly ended up on regular video calls tracking Dressel’s training, and over the next year, they worked together to compare data and make adjustments. “I knew that to do this correctly, I wanted I wanted it to be very specific to myself and exactly what I need,” Dressel said. “I wanted to be high maintenance. With the group I put together, I didn’t want anyone to have total control or to have their hands on the reins at all time.”
Together, the team helped Dressel achieve a remarkable performance at this summer’s Toyota U.S. Nationals, a performance which culminated with the country’s fastest time this year in the 50 freestyle. Almost immediately after, they were back in contact plotting out his next steps.
Reuniting with Steve Jungbluth
Caeleb Dressel — Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick
When Dressel and Jungbluth sat down for an extended discussion and reconnected, the biggest issue was logistics. Jungbluth had recently moved from Gainesville to Jacksonville as the head coach of Sporting Jax Aquatic Club. “I don’t have the talent to coach you remotely,” Jungbluth told Dressel.
Dressel, meanwhile, had his own line in the sand. “My non-negotiables were I don’t want to be doubling,” he said. “I want to be home with my family.”
That led to a highly unusual arrangement: Dressel would make the two-hour drive to Jacksonville every Monday to practice under Jungbluth, then stay overnight before another session Tuesday morning. After that, he would return home to Gainesville and not swim until Thursday, when he would return for another two sessions. Four swims a week, no more.
“I don’t want to preach and be like, ‘Oh, you only need to go four days.’ You can’t ignore what the past 15 years of what my workload has been, but I think because of that is why I’m able to do what I do, and also with how specific and how tuned in of every single practice is,” Dressel said. “The practices are very intense. I’m in the water for two, two-and-a-half, somewhere around there.”
The program looks completely different from the work Dressel did under Jungbluth’s watch in his earlier years. “Almost zero,” Jungbluth said of the similarities. Nine practices per week around 6000 meters each has become four sessions of 2000 to 3000, maxing out around 3500. The first two months was even less.
“I was teaching him how to swim again,” Jungbluth said. “I felt like his freestyle, the technique had deteriorated over a period of six or seven years to the point where it was it was pretty awful, and so we just spent those first eight weeks doing a lot of drilling, a lot of slow swimming. Anything that was fast was limited.”
They still incorporate extensive technique work, including one-arm swimming, full stroke at slow speeds and faster efforts with limited dolphin kick and stroke counts. Over time, Dressel and Jungbluth developed a pattern of aerobic work Monday, freestyle power work Tuesday, butterfly power work Thursday and a lactate set Friday. Jungbluth mentioned one set where Dressel raced eight 60-meter repeats, starting from a float 10 meters out from the wall and then flipping into a 50 simulating the back half of his 100s.
“The last couple of weeks before Nationals, we were down to four of those, if I remember correctly, and he’s pushing 24.0s and 23.9s,” Jungbluth said.
Strength and Science
Long before working with Kao, Dressel possessed as much strength as any swimmer, but as the coaching team coalesced and mapped out a training plan, they realized they would need to temporarily shift the emphasis to increase Dressel’s long-term ceiling.
“We actually put his strength and power development on ‘maintenance’ for a majority of the season because there were many things to focus on in the pool as prescribed by Steve and Eva. Because of this, we knew some of his strength and power measures, like his vertical jump, would drop during the season,” Kao said. “I was OK with this because I knew we’d be able to bring back the numbers just in time for Nationals, which we did. There was a lot of communication between Steve, Eva and me to make this happen.”
Caeleb Dressel — Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick
Kao called Dressel “one of the most coachable athletes I’ve ever worked with,” which allowed them to work effectively despite living on opposite sides of the country. Dressel logs his training sessions in an app for Kao to monitor, and he sends workout videos for feedback. They agreed from the beginning that Dressel would occasionally travel to California so they could reassess the program.
“When you have a coachable athlete like Caeleb, who does everything you ask of him to the T, and trusts you 100%, you have the freedom to control all the inputs and observe the outputs. When you get athletes who question the process, don’t allow you to make mistakes, try to coax you into applying new inputs, and introduce other inputs into the system without your knowledge, achieving long-term success becomes difficult because you’re unsure what inputs produced what outputs,” Kao said. “With Caeleb, I never had to think or worry about that, which will help Steve, Eva and me gain an even greater understanding of Caeleb over the next two years.”
Finally, Piatrikova performs testing to help Dressel maximize his training through testing his efficiency, anaerobic capacity, VO2, blood lactate and more, and she manages his nutrition plan. Although she is based even further away than Kao, she travels to work with Dressel in-person every two months. During that time, Piatrikova has become close with Dressel’s family, and his 3-year-old son August already refers to her as “Aunt Eva.”
Piatrikova communicates the results of her testing to Jungbluth and Kao so they can tailor sets to achieve the maximum training effect. For instance, Piatrikova communicates the optimal amount of post-race recovery Dressel needs, and she has worked with Jungbluth to progressively increase rest in power rack sets to account for deterioriating muscle efficiency.
“I think the most exciting thing for me is that Caeleb responds very well to training when it’s prescribed based on his data and his current needs,” Piatrikova said. “He has already achieved amazing things from training that wasn’t arguably prescribed to his unique physiology, so I think his best years are yet to come.”
Moving Forward With Confidence
His performances at Nationals reignited Dressel’s confidence, and his team felt the same. The coaches planned to largely continue what had been working into the 2026-27 season, with the biggest chances likely to come in the gym; after months of maintaining strength, Kao planned to bring Dressel into a lengthy phase of developing strength.
“My main takeaway is that we can be confident the journey we’ve chosen is the right one,” Piatrikova said. “Despite the ups and downs this year, I think we’ve figured out a lot in a very short space of time, and we now know how we’d like to approach things and how we all work together. We fixed some big ‘leaks’ this year, and now we’re going to build on this in the coming season while having fun and a great time as a team.”
Dressel, meanwhile, believed fully in his team even before he showed off his resurgence to the world. Three individuals, only one of whom Dressel knew beforehand and none with any background working together, helped return him to his status as one of the world’s premier sprinters thanks to their individual dedication and willingness to collaborate.
“The team’s been fantastic, just how much they’ve put into this. All I’ve really had to do is listen. But their passion, it’s inspiring watching Sean, Steve and Eva, how much they’ve put into this, their passion behind it, their excitement, their emotion,” Dressel said. “I’m really just a good listener, and I’m just doing what the team is telling me. So I’ll give myself credit for putting the team together, and then just being a good listener.”