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2004 RC Alum
Competed In Previous Trials
After Ali Pfaff’s success in the U.S. Olympic Trials, another former Rockbridge County High School swimmer offered his thoughts on how Pfaff performed.
William Copeland, a 2004 RC graduate who won several state titles and competed in the Olympic trials three times, narrowly missed qualifying for the U.S. Olympic Team in his final attempt in 2016. When Copeland, now 38, was training for the trials in the early part of 2016, he and 2015 Washington and Lee University law graduate Brendan McHugh visited the Rockbridge Aquatics Center in Lexington and worked with Pfaff, then 11 years old, and other youths in swimming clinics. McHugh also came close to making the U.S. Olympic Team in 2016.
Like Copeland, Pfaff was coached by Leslie Ayers at a young age and found her swimming specialty early.
“A lot of younger kids are like, I really want to be a butterflyer,” said Copeland in a phone interview on Thursday. “Oftentimes, it’s the stroke that chooses you, rather than the other way around. For me, it was freestyle, and for her, it was backstroke.”
Copeland noted that the U.S. has had strong backstroke swimmers for a long time.
Copeland, who was inducted into the inaugural RC Athletic Hall of Fame two years ago, said he watched as much of the Olympic Trials as he could. Commending Pfaff for how she swam, Copeland said, “I was super impressed with her.”
Copeland noted that, with an event so huge as the Olympic Trials, only about a quarter of the swimmers’ times are personal records, so it was exceptional that Pfaff swam her personal record in the 100meter backstroke. He recalled that, when he was competing in the Olympic Trials, pyrotechnics would go off before each race, and he could often feel the heat from them.
Looking ahead, Copeland is optimistic about Pfaff’s swimming career and what she can accomplish. Seeing that she just completed her freshman year at Duke University, her situation is “perfect, timing wise,” he said.
After swimming competitively in high school, at the University of California, Berkeley and beyond, Copeland and his friend Nathan Adrian bought a full-sized pool and a smaller teaching pool in 2019 in San Rafael, Calif., just north of San Francisco, where he lives.
They run a learn-to-swim school for youth swimmers. The school is called the AC Swim Club, and Copeland spends much of his time scheduling and training the teachers, and he works with a pre-teen (ages 7-12). Copeland met Adrian at UC-Berkeley when the two were teammates. Adrian, who specialized in short-distance freestyle races, made the Summer Olympics three times, earning eight medals, including five gold medals. AC Swim Club was founded 1948 by Ann Curtis, a swimmer and two-time Olympic champion from San Francisco.
Copeland is the son of Drs. David Copeland and Irene Townsend. His older sister, Lillian, a 1999 RC graduate, is an oboist and oboe teacher in New York City.
