End of an Era at Brown University Rowing

Brown University women’s rowing coaches John and Phoebe Murphy have announced their retirement after the most successful 40 years in collegiate rowing.

“Being part of Brown women’s crew has been a huge part of our lives, but the time has come to retire and give others a chance to lead this incredible team,” said the Murphys in a joint statement.

“We will miss the great racing and all the exceptional people we raced with and against who made our job so exciting. While we will certainly look back, we also look forward to cheering on future teams’ accomplishments. We will miss the boathouse, the Seekonk [River], and most of all, all the Brown students we have had the privilege to coach. We are always rooting for you.”

The Murphys led Brown to every NCAA championship regatta in the 27-year history of the event, winning seven times. Before the inception of NCAA rowing in 1997, Brown women coached by the Murphys won three IRA championships and the first women’s “Triple Crown” of Eastern Sprints, IRA, and the National Collegiate Rowing Championship.

The Murphys coached Brown to nine Ivy League championships and 10 Eastern Sprints varsity-eight wins. In 2022, Brown became the first American crew to win the Island Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta.

Between them, the married couple has been awarded more than 30 different coach-of-the-year honors and is already in the Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association Hall of Fame.

“John and Phoebe Murphy have had a profound impact on our campus and in the world of rowing,” said M. Grace Calhoun, Brown ‘92, the Mencoff Vice President for Athletics and Recreation.

“Their sporting achievements are extraordinary but they pale in comparison to their invaluable role in shaping generations of student-athletes who have graduated to lives of meaning and success. We could not be more grateful for their leadership.”

Calhoun announced that John Murphy will be succeeded as head coach by Tessa Gobbo, a 2013 Brown graduate who captained the women’s crew and has been an assistant coach at Brown for the past three years.

While she was a Brown assistant coach, the Murphys  helped her become the best coach she could be, Gobbo said, including imparting this hallmark axiom: “Keep it simple and don’t talk too much.”

Gobbo, a 2016 Olympic champion in the women’s eight, won two gold and one silver medal at the three World Rowing Championships leading up to the Rio Games. She credits the intense, pumped-up training environment cultivated by the Murphys for lighting her competitive fire.

She also cites John Murphy’s invaluable advice when she attended her first U.S. National Team selection camp: “Be low maintenance.” This year, Gobbo was inducted into the Brown Athletic Hall of Fame.

Friendly and kind, the Murphys cultivated crews that were fiercely competitive and often beat larger rivals with more highly regarded recruits through the intensity with which they typically raced.

While neither secretive nor aloof, they had “a powerful sense of their own mission” as coaches, said Paul Cooke, the coach of Brown’s men’s rowing team for the past 24 years.

Cooke arrived in Providence as a freshman oarsman two years after John Murphy began coaching the Brown women.

Commitment is the word Cooke used to describe the Murphys, recalling that they were “always aware of being competitive.”

“It’s hard to imagine Brown rowing without them,” Cooke said.

John Murphy began his coaching career in 1976 at Cal-Berkeley, where he was responsible for the men’s novice crew. He continued to coach the men’s novice crew in 1977 and 1978.

In 1979-80, Murphy coached the women’s novice crew at the University of Washington, with the first novice eight going undefeated in the Pac-10 and claiming the West Coast Championship.

Murphy returned to Cal-Berkeley as the novice women’s coach in 1980, winning the Pac-10 West Coast Championship in 1981. His 1982 and 1983 crews were silver-medal winners, and his 1984 crew was the undefeated national champion.

John and Phoebe have three children—Jack ‘11, Penelope, and the late Patrick D. Murphy—and they reside in Barrington, R.I.

In addition to the NCAA championships, their IRA and Cincinnati championship results, combined with second- and third-place NCAA finishes, mean that over the past 40 years, more often than not, Brown University, under the coaching of John and Phoebe Murphy, concluded the season on the national- championship podium.

Although they bear the official title of the Brown University Loyalty Chair for Women’s Rowing John Murphy and Gratitude Chair Associate Head Coach Phoebe Murphy, they are known universally, and will be remembered always, as Brown women’s rowing.

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