When Carol Brown ’75 arrived at Princeton in 1971, she was not an athlete. Five years later, Brown would go on to row for Team USA in the Montreal Olympics, becoming the first of 16 female Princetonian rowers to do so.
The summer before arriving on campus, she received a letter in the mail from Amy Richlin ’73, a transfer student from Smith College who was starting a rowing team. At the time, the only other women’s sports at the University were tennis and field hockey. Richlin had individually mimeographed, stamped, and addressed a letter to each female member of the Class of 1975, trying to sell them on the merits of crew. The letter sparked Brown’s curiosity — particularly its closing line, which read, “The way I figure it, you wouldn’t be coming to Princeton if you liked to do things the easy way.”
So, in the fall of ’71, Brown went to the first team practice, along with many other women intrigued by the invitation. At that point, all she knew about rowing was that it involved “these long boats with long oars.” She would soon learn everything else about the storied sport.
“You’re not going to get rid of us”: Equipment challenges in the early days of women’s rowing at Princeton
“It’s a big horror story,” Brown said, speaking to the trouble the women's rowing team faced accessing equipment.
That first season, women were forbidden from the boathouse and could not be seen while the men were present, so they needed to finish rowing each morning before the men arrived at 7 a.m. There was no women’s locker room nor bathroom. The coach — Pete Raymond '68, who was training for the 1972 Olympics as a lightweight rower — could only work part time.
Some were dissuaded by the harsh rowing conditions.
“When it got dark and wet and cold,” Brown said, “a lot of people drifted off.” Almost all of these women were complete beginners to the sport.
But there were also those who Brown dubbed “a pretty tough group of hard-ass women” who were determined to stick it out. She explained, “The more [they] said no, the more we said ‘BS, you’re not going to get rid of us.’”
In addition to coaching, Raymond also worked a full time job.
“It was out of the goodness of his heart, with no pay and no equipment,” Brown explained. The team needed to hold a bake sale to buy him a rain suit and megaphone. In the fall of 1972, Raymond's friend Al Piranian '69 took over coaching. Piranian also had other commitments, and when he couldn’t make practice, he would leave instructions for Mimi Lyman ’76, a coxswain, to lead the workouts.
“There was no history of all these sports, so you could just try whatever you wanted,” Lyman explained.
With the advent of women's collegiate sports there was a lot of flexibility for young athletes. Lyman appreciated that she did not have to commit to just one sport, as many athletes do nowadays. Similarly, Brown also started and captained the first women’s swimming team, while another teammate, Janet Youngholm ’75, started and captained the women’s basketball team. Lyman herself joined a new women’s ice hockey team.
Because of her small stature at 5 feet 1 inch, Lyman became a coxswain, responsible for steering the boat.
“I thought it’d be nice to finally be the right size for something,” Lyman said. She was also a trained pilot, so steering the boat came easily to her. For Lyman, landing the 60-foot boat on the dock felt “kind of like landing an airplane.”
Though Lyman was a natural, she still wasn’t sure how she felt about the sport. Because boats were not yet equipped with electronic magnification, she had to yell through a megaphone, leading to a hoarse voice.
“A lot of the year, I could just shout, but I couldn’t talk.”
Though she considered leaving the team, there was nobody else who could take over from her as a coxswain. By her senior year, Lyman was a co-captain.
When this team of inexperienced female rowers first formed, nobody dreamed of making it to the Olympics. But their coach told them early on that women’s rowing had been added to the program for the 1976 Games in Montreal — five years out from the team’s formation.
“Any of you could be on that team,” he told them.
Brown recalled the team’s incredulous response.
“We were all like, ‘What are you smoking?’” In their minds, an Olympian needed to start training for the games from childhood. The idea seemed laughable then, but as it turned out, the 1976 U.S. women’s rowing team would comprise women who were new to rowing all across the country, including Princeton.
“Walking into the stadium with the whole world cheering for you”: The first of Princeton’s female rowers hit Olympic grounds in Montreal
For her first three years at Princeton, Brown didn’t think about her Olympic potential.
“I was just racing as Princeton, learning how to row, and getting a little more access to the boathouse,” she said.
Then, in the 1974 Nationals, Brown rowed in a pair with her teammate Janet Youngholm. They won, qualifying them for the World Championships that summer.
Both women had summer jobs, didn’t have coaches, and would need to pay their own way to the competition. So naturally, they abandoned their summer jobs and returned to Princeton, where they found a men’s coach who was willing to work with them. At Reunions, they walked around holding an oar and a donation hat, raising enough to fund their journey to the championships.
There, Brown and Youngholm finished fifth, becoming the only U.S. boat to reach the finals. Brown said that she thought at the time that she should start taking rowing more seriously. So, when Brown had the opportunity to participate in the first women’s national team training camp the summer after she graduated in 1975, she took it.
“It kind of all fit together,” noted Brown.
She remained at Princeton over the summer, working multiple jobs and training with the Olympic coach. Both Brown and Youngholm were invited to the Olympic tryout camp; Brown made the team in the eight boat, while Youngholm did not. But Lyman did make the cut as a coxswain of the four.
“Both of us went to Montreal as the first two Tiger women Olympians,” Brown said.
Everyone on the team had just begun rowing a few years before.
“We were not technically a really good boat, but we were tough, competitive,” Brown explained.
Other teams, like East Germany and Russia, had been training for much longer. Many of these athletes were later discovered to have been using performance-enhancing steroids.
“We didn’t know at the time that we weren’t supposed to beat them,” Brown said. “We didn’t beat them, but we gave it our all.”
In 1976, Lyman came in sixth place, and Brown walked away with a bronze medal. Brown went on to make the 1980 and 1984 teams, though because the United States boycotted the 1980 Olympics, she only competed in 1984. By then, the next generation of Princeton women rowers had already begun to join her.
“A testament to unwavering dedication”: The persisting legacy of Olympian Princeton women’s rowers
By the time Anne Marden ’81 arrived on campus in fall 1976, Brown and Lyman had already made Olympic history. Now, the crew team was more established, and Marden knew she wanted to be a part of it. Having rowed in high school, she was eager to continue the sport in college, and she arrived just in time for the team to be getting a full-time coach — Kris Korzeniowski.
Anne Marden rowing a Pocock Single at her first Nationals, 1978.
Courtesy of Anne Marden
At winter training that year, Korzeniowski gave the team a bench throw test. Though most people only managed 60 or 70 repetitions, Marden, who was on the short side at 5 feet 7 inches, reached 300, at which point Korzeniowski told her to stop.
For Marden and the coach, “It was a wakeup call that I could be as good as someone who was six feet tall, that I really could be a good rower.”
Though women had been competing in college, national, and Olympic rowing for over five years, Marden explained that the playing field remained unequal.
“We got the worst boats, the heaviest boats, the cheapest coach … the laundry list keeps going,” Marden said.
But by 1978, she was a sculler in the World Championships. She then competed on the U.S. team for 14 years — from 1978 to 1992 — with only a few breaks. She also found a way to integrate her academic and athletic interests at Princeton, winning an economics senior thesis prize for her analysis of the most important factors required for athletes to produce an Olympic gold medal.
Marden herself went on to win two Olympic silver medals — for quad sculls in 1984 and single sculls in 1988. Marden also participated in the 1992 Olympics, where she fell ill and didn’t compete as well as she had hoped. But that same year, she beat all international scullers, including some Olympic medalists, at the Head of the Charles, an annual race in Boston.
“So, I feel like I ended on a high note,” Marden said.
As these women passed through Princeton’s rowing program, they watched as resources for men and women gradually reached parity. In the 1990s, the women’s locker room was still smaller than the men’s, who had two locker rooms (one for light-weight and the other for heavy-weight). Because Princeton was once an all-male institution, the boathouse itself was built for men. Now, Princeton offers the same resources for all teams.
“Something that you carry with you for life”: A new generation takes the Olympic stage in Paris
As the 2024 Paris Olympics approach, five women from Princeton are once again training to take up Olympic oars, with three representing the United States, one representing Great Britain, and one representing Uganda.
The sole Ugandan rower is Kathleen Noble ’18, who, like Brown, joined the women’s rowing team her first year with no prior experience.
“I didn’t know anything about rowing before I came to Princeton,” Noble said. But her first-year roommate had been a recruit to the women’s lightweight rowing team, so her sophomore year, Noble walked onto the lightweight team.
Kisubi Beach, Uganda, during a multi-day rowing camp that Kathleen Noble organized in 2022.
Courtesy of Kathleen Noble
The team practiced six times a week and trained even in winter.
“I really enjoyed having that time every day that was kind of set aside, that I didn’t have to think about homework or anything, and I could just be in my body, and exercise, and be outside,” Noble said.
In a “strange twist of fate,” as Noble described it, the Uganda national rowing coach happened to be in Princeton the year Noble started rowing. Noble was born and raised in Uganda to Irish parents, and obtained her Ugandan citizenship in 2022.
Uganda’s rowing community is very small, so the coach was eager to bring Noble into the fold and send her to the World Championships.
“At the time, I was like, I have been rowing for six months. I can’t even balance [the boat],” Noble said.
But the Olympic seed was now planted in Noble’s mind, just as it had been with Brown and Lyman over 40 years prior.
Noble took a semester off of school to row in Uganda, where she had an open invitation to train with the national team. There, she learned how to scull in these “giant old training boats we have there,” and ended up going to the World Championships for Uganda. After graduating from Princeton with a degree in biology, Noble thought her rowing days were behind her, and moved to Utah to work as a wilderness therapy field instructor.
But the Ugandan national coach thought differently — he told her that the Olympic qualifiers were coming up and asked if she wanted to go. Noble started training again in Salt Lake City and qualified for the 2020 Olympics, which were held in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This made Noble the first person to represent Uganda for rowing in the Olympics.
“The thing that was most surprising for me was how much attention I got back home [in Uganda],” Noble said.
In Tokyo, Noble came in 26th. She said she is looking forward to the Paris Olympics as a more social, lively experience than the pandemic games of Tokyo.
“I’m really excited for Paris, for the energy of it, and having spectators, and just being able to get to know people,” Noble said.
She knows she’s gotten faster since she last competed and hopes to break her Tokyo records.
“I am looking to make a new national record and try to set a standard for future Ugandan rowers,” Noble said.
Noble reflected on the sense of pride and legacy that comes with being on women’s rowing at Princeton. She has been inspired by the women who came before her, “who were pioneers and went on to do so well.”
“Being part of Princeton rowing is something that you carry with you for life, something that does connect people across generations.”
“Athletics will always be a part of my life”: The old crowd is still going strong
Noble’s assessment that Princeton women’s rowers never really leave the sport, or the University, behind is fairly accurate. Marden, for example, is back in masters rowing and just won the Henley Royal Regatta this past year in her age group. Lyman only coxed sporadically after her Olympic performance, but she did compete once more in the Head of the Charles in 1977, coxing a women’s four for Brown. They won.
As for the next generation, Noble is not planning to continue rowing and looks forward to starting a career and a family. She is eager to pass the baton to new Ugandan rowers, who she hopes will reach Olympic waters in the years to come.
Lyman and her husband, a men’s rower who she met at Princeton, continue to visit the boathouse together.
Brown still races the Head of the Charles every year, and sometimes visits Princeton’s boathouse and meets with the current women’s team. Now, when the women’s rowing team enters the boathouse, they are greeted by a black and white photograph of Brown and Youngholm rowing in a pair, captured in 1974. Brown wears her hair in two braids, with a look of determination on her face.
When Brown visits campus today, every woman in the boat house recognizes her as Carol Brown. She reflected that 40 years later, she maintains relationships with her fellow rowers from Princeton.
“It’s not something that you graduate [from] and everybody just goes their own way,” she said.
“It’s just a different kind of sport.”
Raphaela Gold is an associate Features editor and head Archives editor at the ‘Prince.’
Please send corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
Editor's note: A previous version of this article misidentified Al Piranian as the coach in 1971. Pete Raymond was the coach. Piranian became coach in 1972.
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