Bryn Mawr Rowing Coach Inducted into
UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame

A face that's familiar on the Bryn Mawr campus was introduced, via the giant screen, to 65,000 football fans at the Rose Bowl Stadium last week. The image of Bryn Mawr Head Rowing Coach Carol Bower appeared on the screen during halftime of the UCLA-Arizona State game when she was honored as an inductee into the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame. She was officially inducted into the Hall of Fame at an awards dinner on Friday, Oct. 6, but when she saw herself magnified at the stadium, it began to sink in.

A 1984 Olympic gold medalist in the women's eights, Bower is no stranger to athletic laurels. After winning the bronze medal in the 1979 World Championships, she joined the U.S. National Women's Rowing team in 1980. She was a three-time World Champion Silver Medalist (1981-83) before taking home the gold medal in the eights during the 1984 Summer Olympics. Bower was selected Oarswoman of the Year in 1982 by the United States Olympic Committee and was inducted in the Rowing Hall of Fame in 1984.

Bower at the awards ceremony with legendary Bruins basketball coach John Wooden, an earlier inductee

At the UCLA Hall of Fame induction, Bower was honored not only for her athletic performance, but also for her efforts to promote gender equity in college sports.

As a junior transfer student, Bower intended to play basketball at UCLA, "but it wiped my knees out and I had to find a new sport," she recalls. The Manhattan Beach, Calif., native was an enthusiastic surfer and canoeist who felt at home in and on the water, so crew seemed a logical choice.

It appears to have been a wise decision: according to the UCLA Web site, "Bower has been called the greatest all-around women's crew athlete in UCLA history." Rowing has played an important role in her life ever since.

After graduating from UCLA with a major in fine arts in 1979, Bower qualified for the 1980 Summer Olympics, but the whole U.S. Olympic team was sidelined that year by its boycott of the Moscow Olympics. "But I got a good job out of it," Bower says.

On the Olympic team Bower met Chris Ernst, the Olympic champion who as an undergraduate had led a protest against the lack of facilities for the women's rowing team at Yale University. Ernst was then resigning her position as coach of the novice rowing team at Yale, and Nat Case, the head coach at Yale and one of the Olympic coaches in 1980, hired Bower to replace her. Bower and Ernst roomed together as they trained for the 1984 Olympics — along with the now-famous philosopher Judith Butler, who was then writing her dissertation.

After her triumph at the '84 Olympics, Bower coached for two years at the East Coast National Team Training Center in Boston. She became head coach of the women's rowing program at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1987-88 academic year. At Penn, Bower took up the cause her mentor Ernst had championed at Yale, campaigning for parity between the men's and women's rowing programs. During her time there, she earned a Master of Science in Organizational Dynamics degree.

Armed with her Penn degree, Bower joined several other Olympic athletes to form a consulting firm. Then she saw an advertisement for a part-time position at Bryn Mawr. "An ambitious group of young women wanted to start a crew program from scratch," Bower said, "and they were looking for help."

Bower bit. In three years, she had guided the rowing club to varsity-team status, and the College hired her as a full-time coach in 2001. She also teaches an orienteering leadership course as well as rowing fitness courses, and she contributes a leadership section to the wellness course that is required for all first-year students.

"I love coaching at Bryn Mawr," Bower says. "I love the balance I have here between coaching and teaching." The hill on which Bryn Mawr sits isn't exactly Mount Olympus, but Bower feels at home here.

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