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O’Callaghan was going from a club team filled with peers similar in age to sharing lanes with established stars Ariarne Titmus and Mitch Larkin.
“It was different training styles and it was a switch of doing more high-intensity training and different sets more structured to you,” O’Callaghan told FINA.
“I think it was hard for the initial transition but it’s something you have to adapt to over time because there was stuff that I never did before like gym and bike, and the structure of the sessions was a lot different than what I was doing at my previous club.
Mollie O’Callaghan had been training at a small club called Waterworx in Springfield, on the outskirts of Brisbane with coach Paul Stansby. As an age group swimmer, she had shown tremendous potential in backstroke. At age 15 in early 2019, she made the move to St. Peters Western just up the road in Brisbane, where coach Dean Boxall took the young teenager into his high-performance group that was quickly becoming one of the best in the world.
