Colorful Team Shapiro Looks to Rosy Future

They don’t wear identical pink swimsuits any more, nor do they travel to meets via motor home as they once did, but Natalie, Stephanie, Valerie and Tiffany Shapiro are still very much a swimming team.

When the sisters from Northridge began swimming seven years ago, their parents outfitted them in T-shirts with a “Team Shapiro” logo emblazoned on the front.

“But we stopped when we figured out what we were doing,” said Valerie, 14. “We put a stop to it.”

Nevertheless, the Team Shapiro concept is still a reality. The sisters train twice a day with CLASS Aquatics in Calabasas and hope to leave a legacy as one of the region’s most-successful swimming families.

They’ve already gotten a pretty good start.

Natalie, 17, and Stephanie, 16, have led Granada Hills High to consecutive City Section girls’ swimming titles.

Valerie, 14, swimming with high-school age swimmers for nearly a year, will be a freshman at Granada Hills.

After experimenting with karate, Tiffany, 12, is quickly catching up to her siblings.

“The only thing I would wish for is the chance to all swim together in high school,” said Natalie, who will be a senior. “We’re close in age, just not close enough.”

Natalie and Stephanie have already outdone the most-famous swimming family at Granada Hills High, at least in the team concept.

Kristine Quance, who competed for the U.S. Olympic team this week, set two national high school records while at Granada Hills and, along with sisters Keri and Julie, made the Highlanders a perennial contender for the City Section title.

But they didn’t win the team title until Julie, the youngest of the Quances, teamed with Natalie and Stephanie to win the City championship in her senior year, 1995.

This year, Natalie and Stephanie teamed with Katherine Nielson and Sarah Clark to break the City Section record in the 400-yard freestyle, a mark set by the Quance sisters and Erin Shaw.

“That was one of our big goals this past season,” Stephanie said. “With the level of competition at the City level [both sisters have won individual titles at the past two championships], we have to shoot for things like records.”

The sets of siblings have more in common. When the Shapiros began swimming, they often car-pooled with Keri and Julie Quance.

Steve Reardon, who coached Granada Hills during the Quance era and through 1995, now coaches the Shapiro sisters at CLASS.

He maintains a close relationship with both families. This week, he was in Atlanta as to see Kristine Quance compete.

Like the Quances, the Shapiros have been excelling outside the high school level as well. Next week Stephanie, who will be a junior, will compete in the U.S. Junior Nationals at Santa Clara.

Natalie, who competed in three previous Junior Nationals, will swim in a meet in Industry Hills this weekend to attempt a qualifying time for Santa Clara. If she doesn’t make it, she will compete in the Junior Olympics at Fullerton with Valerie.

Valerie swam a career-best 1:15.21 in the 100 meter butterfly at an age-group meet last week.

Heather Anderson, an assistant coach at CLASS and a former swimmer at North Carolina State, figures Valerie and Tiffany are likely to follow the same path as their older sisters.

“I was the youngest in a family of three swimming sisters and it’s natural to do the same thing your sister does,” Anderson said. “It’s almost like Natalie and Stephanie are like coaches for them. They watch and tell them how they can improve.”

Although each sister specializes in a different event, they race against each other occasionally in meets. At the Janet Evans Invitational earlier this month, Stephanie told her family to root for Natalie, who was trying to make her qualifying time for Junior Nationals.

Swimming together does come with sacrifice. For the past three years, all four sisters trained and competed with Conejo-Simi Aquatics, but after seeing little improvement in her times, Natalie wanted to make a change.

All three sisters agreed to the change, though one was a little more reluctant than the others.

“It was probably hardest on me,” Valerie said. “I had a lot of close friends and I didn’t want to move. It took me a while but now it’s all right. I know it was important for Natalie to change.”

After all, sisters have to stick together.