Along with head coach Mark Rothstein, whom she reveres, she helped the Wolverines win the Big Ten Championship three times and finish in the top five at the NCAA national championship three times. She is one of the most accomplished assistant coaches in college rowing.

“I love working at Michigan. I love being part of this team,” Tuppen said. “I very much believe in what we do as coaches and getting these young women to be the best versions of themselves.”

But because assistant coaches earn salaries that often make supporting a family or buying a home impossible, Tuppen has made a decision all too familiar to those who’ve coached collegiately for a significant amount of time.

“We do not have children. We do not plan on having children. My career is a factor in that decision. If we were to decide to have kids, I would not be doing this anymore. I would be in another field trying to make more money.”

Such are the harsh realities facing assistant coaches these days, even those at the top of their game.

Assistant coaches are the beating heart of collegiate rowing. They are on recruiting calls late into the evening, then waking up before dawn to select and train crews that will score crucial team points at championship regattas. They are filling gas cans and negotiating prices with hotels and airlines. They are their athlete’s first call when they are struggling and their first hug on the awards dock.

Assistant coaches are often closer to their athletes than head coaches. No rowing team, and certainly no program as large and complex as those in college, could survive, let alone thrive, without the all-encompassing commitment of qualified, passionate assistant coaches. And yet, within rowing, and across collegiate sports in general, assistant coaches face challenges daily that make this an increasingly difficult job.

Typically, rowing coaches begin as volunteers and then graduate to assistant at a mid-major or second or third assistant at a more highly ranked program, to first assistant, to associate head coach, and ultimately head coach.

Some teams, particularly at smaller DI schools or in Divisions II and III, have only one assistant coach, most of them part-timers in DIII. Others, owing to new NCAA DI legislation for women’s teams, can have as many as six. They may be full- or part-time, graduate students or, in some cases, undergraduates, often former team members who’ve been disqualified medically.

“To say they’re crucial is an understatement,” said Peter Steenstra, head coach of men’s and women’s crew at Bates College. “Not only are they there for the team to do whatever is needed but also they benefit my mental health. A good assistant allows me to sleep at night.”

“Having great assistant coaches allows there to be an extension of the overall team culture,” said Wes Ng, head coach of women’s rowing at the University of Pennsylvania, “and an extension of the morals and ethics of how to approach the sport that consistent programs can generate.”

Lizzy Houston, recently tapped to lead Stanford’s lightweight women after coaching as an assistant for three years, says assistants play a vital role in connecting and communicating with team members.

When what the head coach is saying fails to resonate with a particular athlete, “the assistant may say something in a totally different way, but for the exact same change, that makes sense [to the athlete]. Different people see different things, and that’s really helpful.”

To allow assistant coaches to thrive and perform at their best, wise head coaches create an environment that gives their coaches real responsibility, even autonomy.

“One thing I’ve learned about myself,” said Molly Hamrick, associate head coach of the Stanford openweight women, who won the 2023 NCAA national championship, “is that when I feel like I’m actually having an impact on my crews and like I can have a relationship with the athletes independent of the head coach, I’m happiest and most confident, and therefore my best coaching self.”

At DIII Bates, where Steenstra oversees both the men’s and women’s teams, each of his assistants is the primary coach of her own team while he oversees the combined programs.

“When my assistant coaches leave here, they’re ready to be a head coach,” Steenstra said. “You’re coming here to be my assistant because you want to be a professional coach, and I’m going to start training you for that specifically.”

Ng’s approach to growing better coaches is three-pronged: developing their skills; giving them ample credit for team accomplishment; and paying them adequately.

In the collegiate rowing world, Molly Hamrick is a rapidly rising star. She is in her fifth season as an assistant coach with the Stanford University openweight women, and her third as the Alben Family Associate Head Coach. In her time there, the Cardinal have won the NCAA national championship and finished as runners-up twice. They also took home the Pac-12 trophy.

Her coaching journey began in junior rowing. While training with the U.S. National Team and the Riverside Boat Club elite team, Hamrick coached at Riverside, Brookline High School, and Community Rowing, Inc. in Boston.

She then moved on to coach at her alma mater, Princeton University, for two years, where she contributed to two top-10 finishes and consecutive Ivy League titles. She did so as a volunteer, which meant she coached every practice during the academic year with no compensation.

In 2019, Hamrick moved across the country to advance her coaching career and became a full-time assistant with the Stanford openweight women.

“Trust and ownership and having a relationship where the assistant coach isn’t just a yes person but is able to provide opinion and insight and feedback and have actual discussions with the head coach makes a good environment for assistant coaches,” Hamrick said. “I’m lucky where I’m in a role where I trust my head coach to no end.

“I love these kids so much, and I just don’t feel ready to leave yet. It’s very collaborative, not just among the rowing coaches but the entire athletic department. There are assistant-coach meetups where we have lunch and chat about recruiting, official visits, and other hot topics. We learn from each other. It’s such a welcoming, open environment.”

But she, too, is acutely aware of the financial challenges facing assistants, especially in a place like Palo Alto with its notoriously high cost of living.

“Broadly speaking,” she understated, “it’s hard to live on an assistant coach’s salary.”

Compensation sufficient for a rowing coach to make a living is a pressing and perennial concern. First assistant coaches for DI women’s teams make $53,000 on average. That plummets to $38,500 and $35,000 for DIII and DII first-assistant coaches, respectively. And that’s for full-time coaches.

“The pay is challenging,” said Sam Baum, associate head coach of the men’s crew at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Money isn’t the answer to everything,” Tuppen said, “but it’s incredibly helpful.”

In DII and DIII women’s rowing, the majority of first assistants are part-time and make less than $10,000 annually, though they’re at practice every day and travel with the team to training camps and regattas. For some DIII programs, including at Bates, assistant coaches are hourly workers in a profession where the time demands are long and unpredictable.

“When I’m in season, sometimes I’m in the office for 12 to 14 hours a day,” Hamrick said.

Rowing coaches are paid far less than coaches of big revenue-producing sports, yet they’re expected to work with the same dedication and single-minded focus. The highest-paid head coaches of college rowing teams make a fraction of the salary of an assistant football or basketball coach.

Such inequality, some contend, should spur rowing coaches to demand, at the very least, more flexibility and autonomy in their daily and yearly schedules.

“We should not expect people to sacrifice their lives and  life experiences, as athletes do, for their entire career,” Ng said. “That’s not a life well-lived.

“It’s on us to engineer a coaching rhythm that allows for those things [having a family and leading a rich and fulfilling life] to occur.”

That’s why Ng has designated the hours from 10 a.m. to noon each day as time his coaches have to themselves.

Baum commends Scott Frandsen, the head coach of men’s rowing at Cal, for prioritizing his assistants.

“Scott has done a fantastic job of securing the support and resources necessary to make it livable for me in a high cost-of-living area. He’s worked very hard to ingratiate himself with the administration, to ask for important things, and to think of his staff even in front of himself. He’ll say, ‘Bonuses need to go to the assistants.’ Or ‘You guys run the camp. You take all the money from that, and I’ll stay out of it.’”

Many college administrators seem content to pay assistants low wages and deal with the predictable consequence: frequent turnover.

“The general thought process around assistant coaches,” Tuppen said, “is that it should be a revolving door, and you move on to bigger coaching roles somewhere else.”

“Universities have tripled or quadrupled administration,” Steenstra pointed out. “Every school at every level is increasing its middle management, but not its coaching staffs. If they are increasing the coaching staff, it’s with very young, very inexpensive, very inexperienced people who can be turned around quickly. In some cases, you go without them, which just puts more pressure on coaches, pushing them to the edge.”

“Schools don’t allow for mistakes anymore,” said Greg Hughes, head coach of Princeton’s heavyweight men. “You’re supposed to be afraid for your job at all times. That way they can really control you. They have made the jobs so much less for your heart, your spirit. Working hard brought you into the sport. And now working hard means doing exactly what they say, and only what they say. Don’t improvise, don’t get creative. And be afraid of making a mistake.”

The issue of support from the athletic department is particularly evident when it comes to promoting assistants to associate head coach. It’s rare for athletic departments to confer the title on coaches in their first or early years at an institution, regardless of the recommendations of the head coaches who hired them.

When Hughes hired Matt Smith, an Olympian and captain in the U.S. Army who coached for six years at Cornell, it was like hiring a head coach because of his extensive experience.

“It took a really long time for this place to finally accept giving him the title of associate head coach,” a position he’s  held since 2019.

“In my experience, our [athletic department] is fighting our fight with the bigger institution. Human Resources might have a set of standards they have to follow–years required, for example—before somebody can have that title. Internally, the [athletic] department has worked hard within the avenues they can use to recognize people who are making big contributions on the coaching side.”

In addition to all their other duties, head coaches are being forced to become promoters and lobbyists. At Princeton, roughly 180 of the 1,000 varsity athletes on campus are rowers.

“Nearly one fifth of all athletes are here at the boathouse. So we could say, ‘Why don’t we get one fifth of the support?’’ Hughes asked.

“My response is, ‘Why aren’t we doing one fifth of the work to support and promote this place?’”

Stanford’s Houston suggests inviting administrators to the boathouse—a surprisingly uncommon occurrence on most campuses—to see the athletes and coaches in action.

“Athletic departments need to recognize that though it may not be a spectator sport, these athletes work just as hard as a football or basketball team. The more administrators see what coaches do day in and day out to keep things going, the [more likely they are to] recognize those efforts and everything that goes on behind the scenes.”

In the meantime, a common way to bolster the meager salaries of assistant coaches is the revenue from summer camps and in-season clinics.

“There are ways within our sport to help people earn more on the side,” Ng said, “whether it’s coaching clinics or camps or finding different streams of income in the athletic department so that at least they’re not falling behind.”

Stanford’s Hamrick believes coaches need to “move the conversation toward making it less taboo to advocate for yourself. Be grateful for what you have but push the envelope of what you’re asking for, financially and in terms of other resources.”

Coaching organizations, such as the Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association for the women’s teams and the Intercollegiate Rowing Coaches Association for the men’s, can play a helpful role.

“Within those organizations, you can have real conversations with the doors closed and talk about these things as one, even though every Saturday in the spring you try to rip each other’s heads off,” said Hughes, a co-president of the IRCA.

Every four years, the CRCA conducts a comprehensive salary survey of all its member colleges and universities, producing data designed to inform and empower coaches as they negotiate salaries for themselves and their staff.

Some coaches, however, believe that low wages are a character-building part of a coach’s initiation into a demanding profession.

“It’s OK to tread water [financially] for a little while as long as you’re growing professionally,” Ng said.

“It’s a mistake to overpay assistant coaches at the early stages,” Steenstra said. “Look at how many people 20 years ago got into coaching for zero. Many, many, many people did. Nothing about this job comes easily. I want to see that the people who are making $70K and up have gone through a few checkpoints to get to that spot, because they’re professional coaches.”

Sam Baum took a traditional path to collegiate coaching, with one uncommon detour. The year after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Baum became the head coach at Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo, Calif. Shortly thereafter, he moved on to an assistant-coach position with the Yale University heavyweight men under legendary coach Steve Gladstone.

“My directive when I got to Yale was clear: We don’t expect you to come in and know how to coach. What we need you to give us is the enthusiasm to recruit and to help build a program.” There, he helped the varsity eight win two consecutive IRA national championships.

After seven years in New Haven, Baum moved back to his hometown of Berkeley to be the assistant coach for the Cal men with first-time head coach Scott Frandsen. There, he learned to grow and adapt to become the assistant Scott and the team at Cal needed. The varsity eight went on to an undefeated season and the IRA national championship in 2022.

That summer, Baum began reconsidering his career. He had  been coaching exclusively since graduating over a decade earlier and was curious about a more traditional profession. He and his wife had decided to start a family, and the reality of doing that on an assistant coach’s salary was daunting.

So Baum left Cal to work at an executive-search firm.

“I actually liked the new job. I liked learning and I think I could have done that for the rest of my life. But I didn’t find it fulfilling—certainly not as fulfilling as being a coach and a mentor.”

This fall, with a new baby daughter, Baum returned to Cal as the associate head coach.

“I love working with Scott and Brandon. I’m very attached to the team. I love the Bay Area.”

Many coaches hesitate to step away from the profession, fearing they won’t be able to return later. Not Baum.

“I felt comfortable making the leap, thinking ‘You’ve never done anything else. Why don’t you try it?’ Coaching will always be here. You’re not going to forget how to do it. Steve retired seven times before he actually retired!”

Today’s assistant coaches are the head coaches of tomorrow—an obvious fact that would seem compelling enough to motivate the stewards of our sport to do everything possible to make coaching at every level attractive and feasible.

For all the obstacles and sacrifices, however, most college coaches are optimistic about the future and grateful for the privilege of coaching young people.

“It’s important that you enjoy every moment you’re coaching right now,” said Penn coach Ng. “Looking ahead to what comes next can take you far away from the enjoyment of coaching each season.

“We have a limited number of seasons that we’re fortunate enough to be around our sport, so rushing through the first 10 imagining that you’ll get to enjoy it in the 11th through 20th is a mistake. Each year is different and special.”

“Despite all the conflicts, all the difficulties and challenges of these jobs, every single day I get to go out on the river,” said Bates coach Steenstra. “And as I’m watching my crews, I take a breath and say, ‘I have the best job in the world.’

“But that’s one tenth of one percent now. That amount is shrinking all the time.”