Jill Ann Sterkel (born May 27, 1961) is an American former competition swimmer for the University of Texas, an Olympic champion, former world record-holder, andwater polo player. Sterkel won four medals in threeOlympic Games spanning twelve years from 1976 through 1988, and was the first American woman to qualify for four Olympic games. She later served as the women's head coach for her alma mater, theTexas Longhorns swimming and diving team at theUniversity of Texas at Austin from 1993 to 2006.[1]
Sterkel was born inHacienda Heights, California, where she swam forGlen A. Wilson High School, graduating in 1979. She began swimming with the highly competitive El Monte Aquatics Club around the age of 10 under club founder and Coach Don LaMont and continued through her High School Senior year, officially swimming for the Club outside of the High School swimming season.[2]
In March, 1979, in her High School Senior year, Sterkel set an American age group record of 49.55 seconds in 100-yard freestyle at the Southern California Invitational Swim Meet. She later set an American age group record in the 100-yard butterfly of 53.76 at the National AAU Short Course Championships at East Los Angeles College in April, 1979. In High School, she typically swam two practices a day totaling around 4 hours, and weight trained three days a week. Sterkel's Wilson High Swim team was undefeated in her Senior year.[3] Her Wilson High School swim team went undefeated through March of her Senior year, with champion swimmer Mary Birdsell as another team member.[4][2]
As a senior in 1983, Sterkel won the NCAA national championships in the 50-yard butterfly (24.26 seconds) and 100-yard butterfly (53.54 seconds).[6] She won back-to-backHonda Sports Awards for Swimming and Diving, recognizing her as the outstanding college female swimmer of 1979–80 and 1980–81.[7][8] She won sixteen individual national titles with the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) and helped lead the University of Texas Women's team to AIAW national titles in both the 1981 and 1982 seasons. She won a total of 28 awards citing her as an All-American, the maximum that can be awarded to a collegiate swimmer.[1]
Sterkel represented the United States in three Summer Olympics. As a 15-year-old at the1976 Summer Olympics, she won a gold medal as a member of the winning U.S. team in thewomen's 4×100-meter freestyle relay, together with her teammatesKim Peyton,Wendy Boglioli andShirley Babashoff. After the U.S. women's team had been outshone in nearly every event by their East German rivals, Peyton, Boglioli, Sterkel and Babashoff achieved a moral victory by not only winning the relay gold medal, but also by breaking the East Germans' world record in the event final. Individually, she competed in two other events, finishing seventh in the100-meter freestyle and not advancing beyond the preliminary heats in the200-meter freestyle.[9]
Sterkel qualified again for the U.S. national team at the 1980 U.S. Olympic Trials, but because of the American-led boycott of the1980 Summer Olympics, she was unable to participate at the 1980 games held in Moscow, Russia.
At the1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, she swam for the gold medal-winning U.S. team in the preliminary heats of thewomen's 4×100-meter freestyle.[9] Starting at the 1984 games, relay swimmers who swam in the heats, but did not compete in the event finals, were eligible to receive medals.[9]
As a 27-year-old at the1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, she again swam for the U.S. team in the preliminary heats of the4×100-meter freestyle relay, and earned a bronze medal for the team's third-place finish. She also competed individually in the 50-meter freestyle, tying for third with a time of 25.71 and earning a bronze medal.[9]
She swam in the World Championships in 1978 in Berlin and in 1982 Guayaquil taking a total of four medals including a gold, the Pan American Games in both Mexico City in 1975 and in Caracas in 1983 taking a total of two golds and a silver, and the Bucharest Universiade in 1981 where she won five gold medals.[9]
She was also inducted into the Southwest Conference Hall of Fame, and in 2017 the American Swimming Coaches Association (ASCA) Hall of Fame.[1] As a unique honor, in the 1979–80 and the 1980-81 swimming seasons, Terkel received the Broderick Award as the National Swimmer of the Year.[1] During her High School career, she received the National Young American Award for Athletics from the Boy Scouts, and was the Female High School Athlete of the Year for the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) Southern Section in 1978. In her later career, Sterkel was the 2000 Big 12 Conference Coach of the year and was inducted into the Texas Women's Athletics Hall of Honor.[11]
