BEIJING – Here's how members of the U.S. men's water polo team prepared for the Olympics:

They had four coaches in as many years, then had their monthly player stipends eliminated in March 2007 after a subpar finish at the World Championships, then were forced to move in with gracious host families to make ends meet.

“I'm 32 years old,” Coronado High alum Layne Beaubien said, “and I'm living in someone's house – like we were exchange students from Europe.”

It's one of those incongruities of sport. Four years ago the U.S. men had Croatia's Ratko Rudic, the most decorated player and coach in water polo history, and they endured one preposterously grueling workout after another and they weren't living in someone else's house. And they finished seventh in Athens.

Four years later, they go through coaches like swimsuits. They lose their athlete funding just 17 months from the Olympics. They are, in the words of current coach Terry Schroeder, “as close to a dysfunctional family as you can find” when he takes over last year.

“Not a recipe for success,” Beaubien said.

And they destroy polo power Serbia 10-5 in yesterday's semifinals at Yingdong Natatorium and are in tomorrow's gold-medal game against Hungary, 32 minutes from claiming the first U.S. water polo gold medal in history and first medal of any color since 1988.

Said defender Jeffrey Powers: “It's great validation knowing we can play for an Olympic gold and show everyone that the U.S. is not a joke in water polo, like a lot of people think.”

The Americans entered the tournament ranked ninth in the world, so disrespected that word on the pool deck was Serbia purposely lost its final group game against Italy to get on the U.S. side of the medal round bracket.

The Serbians, no longer partnering with Montenegro in Olympic competition, took a 4-3 lead midway through the second quarter. But the plucky Americans allowed just one goal over the final 21:54 while rippling the Serbian net seven times.

The Serbs looked as if they didn't know what hit them.

Rick Merlo did.

“We've got a lot of guys who are really hungry, a lot of guys who are tasting this for the first time,” the 2-meter defender said. “We have a lot of guys who have been at this a lot of years, and it's finally paying off.”

Rudic was the ultimate taskmaster – some would say sadist – having his players swim 10,000, sometimes 15,000 meters (or 9.3 miles) a day in practice, less to get them in physical shape than to forge mental toughness.

“There's no intrinsic value in work,” said Beaubien, whose fellow Coronado High alum, Jesse Smith, was also on both the 2004 and '08 teams. “You could make an argument that we trained as hard or harder than any team in the history of this sport, but we didn't finish. . . . We had so many opportunities in the past where we could have beaten teams like this, but we didn't finish.”

Schroeder has helped, certainly, restore pride to the program. He captained the 1984 and '88 teams that won silver medals (although he is best known as the model for the athlete's statue outside the Los Angeles Coliseum).

“There were a lot of individuals out there,” Schroeder said. “A lot of great pieces, a lot of great players, but they were individuals, and they had to start believing in each other and trusting each other.”

It is a trust forged, in the most ironic of ways, by dysfunction and disrespect. After Rudic returned to Croatia, U.S. women's coach Guy Baker took over the men's program. Then it was Rick Azevedo, the father of veteran attacker Tony Azevedo. Then Schroeder.

Then their funding was cut, the story goes, when U.S. Olympic officials targeted a top-four finish at the 2007 World Championships and the team was ninth.

Adversity bred achievement.

“The glue that keeps the group together,” Beaubien said.

Beaubien has a Stanford degree and, as he put it, “options” in the real world. Moments after the win against Serbia put the U.S. men 32 minutes from water polo immortality, he was asked why he bothered sticking around another four years, given the turmoil and uncertainty.

“This,” he said. “Look, the gamble paid off.”

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Mark Zeigler: (619) 293-2205; mark.zeigler@uniontrib.com