By Lauren Leese ’23
Staff Writer
For the Mount Holyoke rowing team, the new semester brought a new head coach: Cara Murphy ’14, who had worked with the team as an assistant coach since 2018. Murphy succeeds former Head Coach Seth Hussey, who left the role after six seasons.
Hailing from Cleveland, Ohio, Murphy played several different sports growing up, including baseball and soccer. In the ninth grade, she started rowing and discovered a new passion.
“[Rowing] kind of … took over my life,” she said.
During her time at Mount Holyoke, Murphy was a member of the rowing team for four years, and she still looks back on her student-athlete experience as one of her greatest achievements. “I’m really proud of my time that I was here and the stuff that I did,” she said. One of her best memories was of the 2014 Eastern College Athletic Conference National Invitational Collegiate Regatta, where the Lyons went head-to-head with a Smith College boat and won. “They talk about the ‘flow state’ in sports … performing beyond what you can normally do,” Murphy said. “It just happened to be a race where everything worked in the boat … they got off ahead, and we caught them by the end. They had no idea we were coming.”
Murphy initially planned to become a professor but discovered her passion for coaching when she got a summer job coaching a master’s rowing team. “It’s a great way to stay connected to your sport,” Murphy said. “When you become a student of your sport, you just learn to enjoy it so much more.”
After graduating from Mount Holyoke, Murphy earned a Master of Science in Sports and Exercise Studies at Smith College. Her first coaching job following completion of the master’s program was at Colgate University, where she worked for two years until she received a call from then-Rowing Head Coach Seth Hussey. “He was looking for an assistant, and somebody suggested to him that he call me,” Murphy said. “He was … sort of starting [the rowing program] over, and it just seemed like a really interesting project to come and join and be able to give back to my alma mater.”
Regarding the transition from assistant to head coach, Murphy said, “It’s kind of like … when you have a birthday and you’re a year older, but you really don’t feel any older.” However, she also mentioned the increased freedom she now has to make decisions as head coach. “When I sit and think about what I want to do, I actually get to do it instead of having to run it by somebody and say, ‘Hey, well, how would you think about this?’ I just run it by myself.”
Furthermore, Murphy spoke about the unique experience of coaching at her alma mater. “I think that the student-athletes at Mount Holyoke are some of the most interesting people,” she said. “It’s never a dull day because you get challenged intellectually … I have to dig into my fount of knowledge and explain [the] why, the what and [the] how. And that makes me better at what I do.”
Throughout her transition from student to assistant coach to head coach, representing Mount Holyoke has remained at the forefront of Murphy’s mind. “I want [the graduates of the rowing program] to be really good representatives of Mount Holyoke … and also be proud to have them as kind of teammates by association. So yeah, it’s a big responsibility. But it’s so cool,” Murphy said. “You’re once a rower, but you’re always a teammate.”
When asked about her coaching achievements, Murphy again turned it back to the athletes, giving them the credit for the team’s accomplishments. “I kind of show you the path and tell you how to do it, [but] I’m not the one rowing the race,” she said. “[I ask], ‘did I set them up for success?’ And I think for the most part, any boat that I put out there, I’m proud of what they were able to do.”
Looking to the future, Murphy expressed her excitement at being able to continue improving the team even after her collegiate athlete career ended. “It’s an opportunity that so few people have, to be able to come back and work for your alma mater,” Murphy said. “One of the things that I found in my head while I was a rower was this idea of leaving the team in a better spot than when you found it … And I think I did that, and now I just get to keep doing it, which is just so cool … I’m super humbled by the opportunity.”