The Matriarch of Brown Crew

My thirty-five teammates and I lay splayed on the athletic mats of the third floor training room, strappy spandex unisuits saturated with sweat, still collectively trying to catch our breath, lactic acid coursing through our bodies. The mood of the room was already dark after the erg test at the start of practice and was further darkened by what followed. After the team failed to measure up to an unknown standard, we were assigned a truly brutal workout that left us physiologically decimated and residually irritated at the betrayal of our expectations.

Standing above us in her black combat boots and NCAA jacket, Phoebe showed an unusual measure of emotion. “I know none of you wanted to do that. We’re just trying to protect you from disappointment.”

I might’ve imagined it, but I think I heard her voice crack, and it gave me chills. In a world where pain in the present can indeed be protective in the future, her approach makes a beautiful, twisted kind of sense. Our coaches are trying to give us a rare gift: the experience of a well-deserved win.

Phoebe Murphy and her husband, John, co-coach Brown Womens’ Crew. Their dynasty – 36 years and counting – built “the winningest team in NCAA history”, an underdog in the collegiate rowing landscape, known for fostering a gritty, cult-like team environment. As a duo, the Murphys are known for their Darwinist approach to training, but everyone knows that Phoebe is the woman pulling the strings.

Mythos surrounds her larger-than-life character. On the water, she rides her coaching launch like it’s a jetski, her elegantly silver-streaked hair pulled back in a low bun. She posts a piece of paper (torn from a yellow legal pad) on the boathouse corkboard each day, prescribing famously strenuous workouts and emotionally charged lineups in her consistently-messy cursive. Her script is almost as inscrutable as the motivations behind her choices. Still we pore over the sheet, trying to deduce where we stand on the team and, more crucially, whether we have earned her approval recently. 

Phoebe, born Phoebe Manzella, grew up in Barrington, RI, right by Brown’s campus. She learned to row on the Seekonk river as a single sculler in high school. In both 1979 and 1980, she won the famous Head of the Charles Regatta in the lightweight category, and went on to win a junior lightweight national championship. Lightweight rowers are known for a scrappy asceticism, while single scullers tend to be intensely internally driven, and athletes who exist in the middle of the Venn diagram are, invariably, quite tough. In 1980, she won Eastern Sprints in stroke seat of the lightweight varsity 4+, and her teammates clearly admired her, as she was elected captain for the following year. She rowed at Brown for three out of the four years of her degree. Rumor has it she was briefly married to a man in New York City, but apparently it didn’t last, and she returned to Brown as a novice coach a short time after her graduation in 1982. 

John Murphy, who had recently been hired from Berkeley to coach the Brown Women, was encouraged to retain her on the coaching staff. She began as a novice coach; then, in 1985, she stepped away from the sport for four years for unknown reasons. This period was the longest she was ever away from the Seekonk. In 1988, she married John, and when she returned to Marston Boathouse full-time, their joint dynasty began. The team captured their first Eastern Sprints win in 1990. Now, in 2022, Brown is one of only three women’s rowing programs to have qualified for the NCAA championship every year since its inception in 1997, and has won the title more times than any other team. 

Both of the Murphys speak very little during practice. Once per semester, each BWC rower gets a ten-minute slot for what we call Murphy Meetings: sitting in an old wooden chair, across from the two of them in their office, which is decorated floor-to-ceiling with photos of medal wining crews from the past several decades. While an athlete might receive some brief critique – or, much more rarely, praise – during a practice, the meetings are the bulk of coach-athlete communication for many of us. Phoebe’s blunt, biting criticism and unwillingness to sugarcoat anything makes the occasional undiluted compliment much sweeter. 

My freshman fall, in my first meeting, Phoebe told me I had “no glaring flaws”, and I was so excited that I called my parents after practice. It’s crossed my mind that she might see my similarity to her, as the same sort of athlete, her size and a stroke seat myself as per her lineups. But any communion she might feel with me has never been voiced, and she continues to push me to be better. Early in my senior fall, looking me up and down, she said “You can’t just be a tailwind competitor”, ostensibly referring to my late catches at practice that day but mostly addressing my body, small and weak compared to my teammates, built for aerobic endurance more than explosive power. Later in the season, I was finally selected for a boat at the Head of the Charles, a goal I had set for myself five years prior. Phoebe launched my boat on the morning of our race with a few words of encouragement for me: “It’s a tailwind”. That afternoon I had a gold medal around my neck, but the pride I felt came from the precious moment of her faith and its affirmation. On this team, personal fulfillment is only administered in small doses, just enough to keep us hungry, enough to keep the cogs of the machine calibrated for future successes. 

Generations of BWC rowers have fought hard for Phoebe’s respect, and for good reason. Her omniscient bad-cop act, calibrated in perfect complement to John’s “chill grandpa” persona, is underpinned by a fiercely maternal passion, an emulsion of care and control. She and John had three children together, and the team sometimes ponders what it might be like to have them as parents. Occasionally, and very quietly, another fact of their lives together resurfaces. In 2007, their middle child, a 17-year-old boy, was killed in a boating accident. Some say that Phoebe became a tougher, different coach after that.

Her coaching ethos stirs together the murky morality of mental fortitude and the objectivity of the split displayed on the erg monitor. This does not suit everyone who passes through the program. Particularly for my graduating class, who endured a season and a half of training without any of the gratification of spring racing, our attrition rate has been atrocious. Last year Phoebe further reduced our numbers, almost to the point of jeopardizing our full participation at the Ivy Championship, with some unfair comments airing her disregard for mental illness. She stubbornly equates inability with weakness, such that any circumstantial limitation on the part of an athlete is viewed as a personal failure. Those of us who have stayed have learned to negotiate a delicate internal balance of buy-in and healthy spiritual distance from her more damaging rhetoric.

Every December, during the team-guided indoor season, she decorates our training room for the holidays: colorful paper stars with each of our names on them, string lights, trophy goblets filled with fruit and candy canes. The freshmen are unanimously surprised to see her show such whimsy, such tenderness. Her aggressive methods may seem questionable, sometimes, but her track record is second to none, and even if that weren’t the case, she is well-intentioned. She wants us to experience the unparalleled joy of earned success. That being said: racing is full of externalities and outcomes out of our control. So, to sit at the start line knowing you have done everything in your power to prepare yourself, and to finish a race knowing you have done everything in your power to cross the finish line first, constitutes earned success in and of itself. 

For new initiates, this isn’t always apparent. As with a parent, you need to pick and choose what to fully believe, and how to incorporate it into your worldview. Even those elements that don’t become part of you are still pieces of an eclipsing love, but reckoning with them can be painful, and thus the interdependence of the team and its authorities becomes fraught. Making peace with the dissonance between what you are told, what you do, and what you believe is an ongoing and taxing process. You are testing the limits of how sick you can be and still make it through a day of practice, because you feel you have no other option; you are bone-tired and borderline delirious from spring break training, but you persevere because even though it’s physiologically counterproductive at this point, it might make you tougher; you simultaneously encourage your teammates to push themselves to the limit and to take care of themselves, knowing full well that these exist in opposition. BWC members manage these disparities together, and much of the support we receive comes from one another. The emotional labor of the team is immense, not always heavy, but always present. 

In the sport of rowing, pain exists as a constant. Also, as the only truly team-based endurance sport, it breeds a unique interpersonal intensity. Our talents, virtues, limitations, and emotions blend together, on and off the water. Every woman on the team clearly has a loaded relationship with challenge and approval, because participation in this training regime requires an element of personal strangeness, the nature of which varies from rower to rower. For most of us, Phoebe is something of a manifestation of whatever drives us to come to the boathouse every day. Projecting onto her our motivations is powerful. 

More powerful, though, is her presence at Marston Boathouse, a constant source of anxiety but also a comfort. When she was away for a day this fall, it felt like when your parents leave you with a babysitter on short notice: disorienting, vulnerable, uncertain. Her guidance provides direction in that it provides a meaning beneath the madness. Her ruthless prescriptions and her watchful eyes compel us to care harder, to ardently and conscientiously fuel the team with our life force, to be more than what we are. It hurts, but it works.

There is no cut-and-dry way to experience the Murphy training process, and if you are struggling to feel the love, you’re certainly not the first. Once during the dark winter of my freshman year, I was feeling hopeless. I called my high school coach after practice. I asked him, what’s the point of this? Why does this group of smart and capable women choose to break ourselves over the flywheel of the machine when we could be trying to solve global warming or something? He was quiet for a moment, then told me that we do this because we want to prove to ourselves that we can, and that the process of doing so makes us better. That we should consider how we get to do this, not how we have to do this. That it’s a great privilege to be able to pour your body and soul into something that matters to such a small number of people for such a fleeting period of time, and that the joy of completely giving oneself over to a perfectly calibrated machine is unlike any other joy. And to derive the joy from the daily pain of training requires an acknowledgment of the privilege. 

For the machine to exist at all – for the speed and the joy and the challenge to exist – requires the work of a persistent heart: the conductor, the matriarch.