Xavier to Hire First Varsity Coach in School History
Xavier University of Louisiana will hire its first ever men’s and women’s head varsity rowing coach as the university will be elevating the current co-ed team from club to varsity beginning in the fall of 2025. With this move Xavier will become the first and only HBCU in the nation to offer co-ed varsity rowing.
There will have been a club rowing team for two years at Xavier before the team moves to varsity with an active group of engaged students, many of whom learned to row once they reached college.
Dr. Elizabeth Manley, professor of history and department chair, is a member of the New Orleans Rowing Club (NORC) and is one of several dedicated individuals who helped the club team go from an idea to reality.
“Around 2020 there was a lot of conversation about who rows and who has access to rowing,” stated Manley. “I started thinking about how I have this position at Xavier and as a HBCU Xavier is limited in resources. There’s not a lot of space for club sports but last fall we started a club program with the help of NORC.”
Initially the team operated like an extended learn-to-row program. There were a lot of supporters of the program, and it started to gain attention from the university’s administration, which was already planning to expand current sports and offerings for students.
“By the time we started having these conversations with them there was already a club in place, and we had a little more than a dozen students who were getting into the sport,” said Manley. “The administration decided last spring that they were going to add rowing as a varsity sport so it is a program that will be built mostly from the ground up.”
The head coach will be expected to carry out the typical tasks of a collegiate head coach in addition to focusing on starting up the team, gaining interest from students and community members and heavily recruiting especially during the transition to varsity.
“The coach should be someone who is a typical head coach and in other ways is pioneering to build the first coed HBCU program in the country ever,” noted Manley. “Howard University had a program in the late 60s for men only. Saint Augustine’s University started a women’s only program—this will be the first co-ed program.”
Xavier will compete in NAIA and do much of its racing locally in Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, and Georgia in addition to competing at ACRA and SRAA events.
“As we are trying to change the way that rowing looks. A lot of these amazing efforts have happened at the middle school and high school level. We also need to make it clear to these rowers that there are spaces within the collegiate landscape for them. I’ve talked to Arshay Cooper [author of A Most Beautiful Thing] and he has had a lot of rowers that end up no longer rowing because it is important to them that they got to an HBCU so this is an opportunity for them to not have to make that choice but it’s also a larger statement that there is a real commitment from beginning of career to all points in a rowing career to open up different kinds of spaces for potential rowers.”
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