Jaylen Brown was not the most accomplished athlete in this arena.
It doesn’t happen often.
It was the case, however, when the four-time NBA All-Star jumped into the 10-lane pool at the Connell Recreation Center on the campus of Boston College. Brown, who has trained in the water over the last four offseasons, was there to work with five-time Olympian and current Boston College swim coach Dara Torres.
Torres received a request from Celtics trainer Drew Moore asking if any Eagles coaches would train a hoopster in the water. The four-time gold medalist graciously accepted and found out it was Brown the night before their first workout.
“I really thought he was going to sink,” Torres said of the 6-foot-6, 223-pound Brown, who doesn’t exactly mirror the slender swimmer physique. “Because the more muscular you are, the more you’re going to be underwater.”
Brown wasn’t jumping into the deep end for the first time, though.
Celtics fans are familiar with the videos of Brown leaping from the pool’s floor to the surface with dumbbells in hand. There are clips of Brown wearing a weighted vest while treading water for minutes at a time. Working with Brown this summer, Torres became familiar with the Celtics star’s desire to document. He had her videotape nearly every lap. It was his way of pairing his analytical mind with visual learning, she said.
This offseason featured a different kind of training, however. Brown wasn’t dragging dumbbells into the deep end but instead working on the efficiency of his swimming strokes.
Perfecting a new craft
“(I tried) just to perfect my form in the water,” Brown said during his Celtics Media Day interview with NBC Sports Boston. “Try to master your efficiency, no wasted movement. I feel like the better swimmer you are is an analogy to life. You don’t want no wasted movement, no drag, no extra. You want to just be able to get from Point A to Point B as easy as possible.”
Torres saw immediate improvement from Brown.
“He could see the mistakes that he made at the beginning, and then the corrections that he made afterwards,” said Torres, who was the first swimmer to represent the U.S. in five Olympic Games. “You can see how much more efficient he was as he made those changes.”
Torres recalled a specific time when she instructed Brown to do his kick a certain way while swimming freestyle. He processed it, practiced it and wouldn’t freestyle until he knew he had the kick correct.
“You can tell he’s a perfectionist,” Torres said.
They also worked on underwater kicks with fins; Brown impressed Torres when he swam the length of the pool under water on the first try. They worked on his form and specifically where his head was positioned while under water, which isn’t easy for tall and muscular swimmers. He mastered it almost immediately, Torres said.
“I mean, he picks up things like this,” Torres said while snapping her fingers. “I turned to my assistant coach and said, ‘Wow, I wish all of our athletes were like this.”
Jerry Lai-USA TODAY Sports
Jerry Lai-USA TODAY Sports Dara Torres competed in five Olympic Games for Team USA, winning a total of 12 medals.
Recovery in the pool
Brown started training with Torres less than one month after he had a minor knee surgery to address his partially torn meniscus. The injury limited Brown to 63 games during the 2024-25 campaign and, at times, seemed to hinder his explosiveness.
Need proof his recovery went well? Torres, who worked with Brown three or more times per week starting in July, didn’t even know he had surgery.
“That’s news to me,” Torres said. “He didn’t look like it at all.”
Without knowing, Torres used a training tactic she believes could’ve helped Brown.
“One of the things to make it a little easier for him to learn his strokes and his technique was to put fins on him,” Torres said. “The fins force you not to kick big, but to kick very small. That might have helped him, too. But we didn’t really discuss his knee surgery.”
Brown recently said his knee feels “awesome.”
The NBA Finals MVP has been open about the positive impact of training in the water. He’s said his body transformation is a product of his water workouts and has stressed the benefits it has when it comes to his breathing. It all helps his day-to-day recovery during a grueling basketball season.
With that, it wasn’t a surprise to see Brown back in the pool, especially considering the mid-June operation. Athletes use pools to aid their rehabilitation.
“I believe swimming can really help with rehab, and you see a lot of physical therapy people doing rehab in the pool, because you’re not pounding your joints,” Torres said. “It’s almost like you’re floating on air, but yet there is some resistance.”
Inspiration from MJ
Brown isn’t the first professional athlete to train in the pool, of course.
Torres saw it firsthand when she trained at Stanford University before the 2000 Summer Olympics. The 12-time medalist, who made her first U.S. national team at the age of 14, recalled swimming alongside Pro Football Hall of Famer Jerry Rice. The former San Francisco 49ers wide receiver, Torres said, swam laps, did water workouts and ran in the pool.
Brown apparently found his own inspiration from Michael Jordan.
“When Jaylen asked us to come and train him I said, ‘Well, how did you get into swimming?'” Torres recalled. “He’s like, ‘A lot of people don’t know that Michael Jordan used to train in the pool because he didn’t really talk about it.'”
Torres, who hadn’t trained any professionals before Brown, believes there’s a good reason water workouts have become popular. It’s a challenge — and one that Brown loves.
“You can be on a court and dribbling a ball, and you may not be using every single muscle, but in the pool you’re working every muscle,” she said. “I think that really helps you with other aspects if you compete in different sports.”
It’s helped Brown in the past, and Celtics fans surely are hoping it will continue to help the 10-year veteran season as he enters his own arena.
Editor’s Note: We’re in Day 2 of our “7 Days of Jaylen Brown” content series, during which NBC Sports Boston is highlighting the Celtics star’s unique contributions on and off the court. Follow our platforms for more Brown content every day leading up to Opening Night.
