By Bob Ford
The first time Jon Miller became aware that Vanderbilt University had a rowing program was when he stole one of their boats.
To put the tale in a more favorable light, “borrowed” might be a better verb, but when you drop somebody else’s boat in the water and go rowing off, the distinction is thin.
Miller, home in Nashville for the summer after his sophomore year of rowing at Michigan, ran into a high-school classmate who also had become a college rower.
“She said, ‘Hey, there’s this double out at the lake. I think it’s Vanderbilt’s. We should go row it.’ I don’t think we got permission,” Miller said. “So we took this double out a couple times, and that’s the only reason I even knew Vanderbilt had a team.”
He could be forgiven the oversight. Vanderbilt’s rowing program began in 1985 but didn’t gain much traction until Miller graduated from Michigan, moved back home to Nashville, and two years later, in 2009, agreed to become head coach of the Commodores.
“I was like, maybe I’ll do this for a year or two,” Miller said. “And here I am now.”
Rowing is a club sport at Vanderbilt, and the coaches are not school employees. Miller and his five assistants receive modest volunteer stipends, but everyone has a day job or postgraduate studies that take precedence once practice finishes as the sun rises over Percy Priest Lake, 10 miles east of Nashville.
Competing in the American Collegiate Rowing Association, Vanderbilt won its first ACRA championship regatta medal in 2010 and has improved steadily on both the men’s and women’s sides under Miller and his staff.
The last several years–once free of Covid restrictions that limited training to single sculls and solitary ergometer sessions–have seen a remarkable stretch of success. Beginning with a 2021 gold for the men’s four at the Head of the Charles, a win that had an enormous impact on recruiting, Vanderbilt has made sure no one in the rowing community is still unaware the program exists. The recent results have been highlighted by the women’s eight, which has finished on the podium in each of the last three ACRA championship regattas, taking silver in 2023, then back-to-back gold medals in 2024 and 2025.
“What we’re accomplishing now is what I always thought we could. It took a little longer than I thought it would, and that’s just the truth of it,” Miller said. “I was a pretty young coach who made some mistakes. It took a while to refine what would work for us. The big thing is, they buy in. There’s a mutual respect for what we’re trying to do. They know I’m not perfect, I know they’re not perfect, but all of us show up trying to give our best every day.”
Cornelius Vanderbilt had his own success on the water, building what became a shipping empire from a humble ferry service with one small boat operating between Staten Island and Manhattan. Vanderbilt did not row the boat but he chased business with such zeal that other captains dubbed him “The Commodore,” somewhat derisively. This bothered Vanderbilt not at all.
He would certainly take pride in the current rise-from-nothing success of the rowing program at the university that bears both his name and his nickname.
Competing at the club level brings a unique set of challenges. ACRA is the largest governing body in collegiate rowing, with more than 152 member institutions. There are no scholarships, and facilities vary widely. Vanderbilt is better off than many club programs–with a travel budget for occasional trips to regattas, very good equipment, and an enviable erg room. On the other hand, the Commodores don’t even have a boathouse at the lake. The boats are on trailers or blocks, some with covers, some not. When rowers flip over the boats to begin the day, they need to evict all manner of intruders.
“It seems like every year we lose a frosh because they roll it over on the first day and there’s a bunch of ants or wasps in their seat. They flip out, and you never see them again,” Miller said. “You just shrug and think it wasn’t meant to be. And we’ve got mice and other rodents that chew up the wiring in the boat, so we go through a decent amount of wiring.”
Club sports at Vanderbilt fall under the umbrella of the athletic department but are administered by the Recreation and Wellness Center. The purpose is to make sports—there are approximately 30 club teams at Vanderbilt—available to anyone in the student body who wants to participate. Miller doesn’t make cuts, and easily three-quarters of his rowers come to the program with no prior experience.
“An advantage of not having scholarships is that everyone there wants to be there,” said Sarina Samuel, who was in the eight for three years and just graduated. “No one is paying you to wake up at 4:40 in the morning and be out there in the freezing cold working as hard as you can. That mentality and that culture is unique. The culture of the program is that we’re the underdogs. We don’t have a boathouse. We don’t have university funding in the same way as some other programs. My freshman year, we couldn’t even fill an eight. It’s been special to be part of that program, and I’m excited for what they can do next.”
When Miller began building the women’s eight, he told the women he was hoping to put in the boat that he had very ambitious plans for it.
“He could see the potential in the team before anyone else,” said Norah Kolb, who is a senior this year and two-time ACRA First Team All-American. “He said in a couple of years we’re going to be this and do this, and I just had never heard a coach talking about their goals that far out and being so secure in them.”
There was a different lineup in the eight every year once it became established, of course, and different lineups at different races. Three women were constants in the boat that medaled at the three consecutive ACRA regattas: Samuel, Kolb, and Amelia Simpson. What makes that most interesting is that each represents one of the paths to club rowing.
Samuel began rowing with a private club in Miami Beach when she was in seventh grade and wanted to stay with the sport. Kolb, from Newtown, Conn., was a competitive swimmer in high school, burned out on that, and decided to try something else. She had never rowed. Simpson, from Brisbane, Australia, had ridden horses growing up but wasn’t a competitive team athlete. “I wasn’t a competitive anything,” said Simpson, who graduated this year.
Combine that obvious learning curve for the newcomers with the technical aspects of being in an eight, and you can see the distance that had to be traveled to get to the top step of the medal stand.
“We sat those women down, and none of them knew what ACRA was, and none knew that we hadn’t even sniffed the grand final in the women’s eight,” Miller said. “But we told them that they would medal at ACRA before they graduated. They didn’t know how tall a task that was. They were just like, ‘Hey, that seems like a good goal. Let’s do it.’ So, you don’t have to deal with: ‘Shoot, coach, how are we going to do that?’ That group just bought in.”
In 2023, the women’s eight came in second to Bowdoin in the grand final, nearly three seconds behind. It was an amazing accomplishment, but it still wasn’t satisfying.
“We were crushed. It was a weird feeling that it didn’t feel as good as we thought it would,” Miller said. “We knew that we were trying to win gold.”
That happened the following spring, when the eight edged Purdue (by 0.28 of a second) to claim the title. This past spring, completing the cycle of improvement, the team won the grand final by open water over Northwestern.
“You get the right people in the right culture,” Simpson said. “I’d say we were never satisfied. We wanted to stay greedy, to stay hungry.”
“It’s not glamorous,” Kolb said. “You show up in the cold, and there’s spiders in the boat, and you have to wade through the mud to get your boat, but that’s the grit that made this team stronger. We’re racing side by side against DI programs, and we know what they have access to, and it just makes it so much more special.”
“I was leaning very strongly toward going to a Division I school,” Samuel said. “When you’re in high school and that’s what your friends are doing, you want to prove you can do it, too.
“But I can remember one of my first conversations with Jon, and the passion he had for the program, and the action items he had. I was super excited to be part of a program that’s progressing. I’m motivated by progress, and it was great to be part of a program that was growing and gaining momentum.”
It isn’t all early-morning wake-ups and late-night erging, of course. Their journey is longer than 2,000 meters and more lasting than a gold medal that might end up in a drawer. The coaches and the rowers have built something special on a foundation that was decidedly modest. That is the journey that will last for them, and who needs a boathouse when you have that?
Bob Ford, a seven-time Pennsylvania Sportswriter of the Year, wrote for The Philadelphia Inquirer for more than 30 years, during which he covered plenty of rowing. His rowing-related thrills included stories about Prince Albert of Monaco, grandson of Jack Kelly, the fabled Philadelphia oarsman—albeit focused on bobsledding.