On the plaque: 1996 and 1997 NCAA Championships qualifier who won six Easterns/Ivy Championships titles, three more than any Penn swimmer prior to his arrival. Three-time Ivy champion in the 200 butterfly—the first Penn swimmer to three-peat an event—as well as two titles in 500 freestyle and one in 200 freestyle. At 1997 Easterns, Phil Moriarty Award recipient as the champion-meet high scorer and Harold S. Ulen Award winner as Ivy League career high-point scorer. His 200 freestyle school record lasted 17 years while his 500 freestyle record stood for 13.
 
At every step of his swimming career, Jeff Brown W'97 has been surrounded by family.
 
Brown swam with his siblings from a young age—first recreationally, then competitively. In college, with his twin brother Bobby on the team, Jeff was a standout for Penn. And even though he didn't know it at the time, there was another Brown family member on those Quaker swim teams: his future wife, Lauren.
 
And, of course, all the other swimmers on the team who became his brothers and sisters by default.
 
"Swimming with [Bobby], swimming with Lauren, and then just in general, the people I swam with were my closest friends in college," Brown said, "and they continue to be some of my closest friends more than 20 years later."
 
Brown's swimming ability brought him more than just friendships. In his years at Penn, he won six Ivy League titles—three in the 200 butterfly, two in the 500 freestyle, and one in the 200 free—and qualified for the NCAA Championships in his junior and senior seasons.
 
A four-year letter winner and two-time captain, Brown scored more points than any other swimmer at the 1997 Eastern Championships, and that year he received the Harold S. Ulen Award as the highest four-year cumulative point scorer at the event. His record times in the 200 and 500 Free both held up for more than a decade at Penn, and now he's being enshrined in the Penn Athletics Hall of Fame.
 
"It's nice to be recognized, but it's not the sort of thing that I've given much thought to in the 20-plus years since I stopped swimming, so it was something of a surprise," Brown said. "Swimming was very, very personal to me and I love the sport. I love swimming."
 
Growing up in Houston, Jeff, his brother Bobby, and his younger sister Christy all swam from a young age. Their father Bob worked, so the kids made it easy on their mother Jayne, who would drop them off at the pool together and come back for them when they were done, without having to shuttle them around to multiple places.
 
"Swimming is a huge part of the culture there," Jeff Brown said. "The summers are extremely hot, so there's a pool in every neighborhood. In the summer we would just go to the pool for the entire day. You kind of grew up around pools. It was just a central part of what we did."
 
Starting when he was seven or eight years old, Brown began competing in summer-league meets against other local neighborhoods, and by the time he was in middle school, he and his siblings had decided on swimming as their primary sport and started taking things more seriously.
 
"All three of us liked it and were pretty good at it," Brown said. "By the time I got to be about 10 or so, it was the sport that our family was focused on."
 
Fast forward to his junior year of high school, and Brown was one of the top freestyle swimmers in the state of Texas. He caught the eye of Penn head coach Kathy Lawlor Gilbert and her assistant coach Mike Schnur, and the program started heavily recruiting Brown, who also excelled academically. After being accepted to the Wharton School, Brown committed to Penn, kicking off one of the best swimming careers in school history.
 
Coincidentally, Bobby Brown also decided to study at the Wharton School, so it was set that the two brothers would stay together for another four years after swimming alongside one another throughout their childhoods. For Penn swimming, that was the cherry on top to Jeff's commitment, as the coaches hadn't been aware of Bobby during the recruiting process.
 
"We didn't even know Bobby existed," said Schnur, who is now head coach of the program. "When we were getting our commitment from Jeff he said 'oh yeah, I have this twin brother who got in, can he swim too?' and we were like, 'absolutely.' We got to know Bobby pretty quickly the next year as well. They're very different guys, swam totally different events, totally different physiques, totally different people, but it was really fun to have them both."
 
"We both came to independent conclusions that Penn and Wharton was the right choice for each of us," Jeff Brown added. "My sister (Christy) actually went on a full swimming scholarship to the University of Illinois, so all three of us were college swimmers."
 
From that point on, the family that Brown had at Penn only grew. He quickly bonded with many of his teammates in and out of the pool and became a mainstay for the program, both with his impressive meet results and the way he was able to push the rest of the team. The regular team dinners and the long road trips to Dartmouth and Cornell brought the team closer, and the tight-knit, co-ed group lived together as a family in a row home during senior year.
 
Brown even developed long-lasting relationships with his coaches and regularly spent time just chatting in their office.
 
"He was hilarious. Jeff would constantly challenge you, every day, on an intellectual level. It was a challenge to him to sort of compete in everything he did, so he always wanted to understand the intellectual side of swimming, so it was a constant treatise every day, I used to call it. It was fun," Schnur said. "He was a great guy. He was a lot of fun to coach. I wish I had like 20 of him."
 
The most valuable of the connections Brown formed at Penn was with his now-wife Lauren. Lauren was a manager her freshman year and soon became the heart and soul of the women's team, and though Brown was two years ahead of her, the two clicked from the get-go, and the dynamic between them evolved right in front of their coaches' and peers' eyes.
 
They began dating soon after college, got married, and are now parents to three kids.
 
"We saw the interaction between the two of them every day. It was pretty funny to watch," Schnur said. "At first he wasn't so nice to her, he used to make fun of Lauren a little bit, but they got along really well and a blind man could see they were getting married."
 
The two now live in Duxbury, Mass. and though Brown stopped competing some years ago, swimming continues to run through his family. He watches with pride as his three children, Allison, age 13, Meredith, age 10, and Michael, age 8, are all getting involved in swimming, just like he and his siblings did back in Houston.
 
And though his work in the finance world is far removed from his swimming career, Brown and his family still come out to watch the Penn swimmers when they have meets at Harvard and Brown University. He and Lauren serve on the program's board of overseers, and have helped organized a number of reunions with the rest of the swimmers from their time at Penn.
 
To Brown, that's the most meaningful part.
 
"The big takeaway from swimming at Penn was all the people I did with, that being people who are important in my life to this day," he said. "Far and away, over the awards and the records, that's the stuff that's important to me."