The NCAA Rowing championships start Friday, and row2k caught up with the coaches of three of the top four seeded teams when they won their conference AQ's two weeks ago: Princeton's Lori Dauphiny, Stanford's Derek Byrnes, and Texas' Dave O'Neill.
Before racing gets going, row2k chatted with the fourth: Kim Cupini, the coach of the Tennessee squad that comes into NCAAs polling at #3. Cupini took over the Tennessee program last summer, and led the Lady Vols to an undefeated regular season in the 1V and 2V, and then putting up some very close second place finishes against Texas at the Big 12 Championship to cap of the season and earn an At Large bid.
Tennessee, which has never finished higher at NCAAs than the 9th place it notched in 2007, comes into the 2024 Championships seeded 4th in the 1V8, 2nd in the 2V8, and 7th in the V4. On paper, if the seeds hold, Tennessee could take third overall, and will almost certainly put up the school's best performance to date.
Cupini's SMU team also finished 9th as a team last year, before she accepted Tennessee's offer. She led SMU to their first three team bids ever, and her varsity eight finished 7th in the country by winning the petite final in 2023, also a first for the Mustangs.
The program she is putting together at Tennessee is a mixture of athletes who were already at the school and some of the women from SMU who either went to Dallas originally as recruits to row for her and her staff, or who liked the culture she built so much that they wanted to enter the NCAA's new transfer portal to keep working with her at Tennessee.
row2k asked Cupini about the make-up of the team she is building her program around and bringing to NCAAs this week, and she talked about how some of the athletes she had coached at SMU decided to seek out transferring once her move was announced last year.
"Right away, they were saying, where's our head coach, we want to talk to her. Get us on the portal," Cupini said, noting how she then had to recruit them all over again out of the portal.
"It's not as easy as people might think," she added. "How hard is to get their credits to transfer over, find them housing last minute, get them scholarships that are adequate for them when you are still trying to balance all the athletes already on the team. There's a lot of logistic challenges behind it.
"We did bring a handful over with us. We brought some stars, but we also had people that just wanted to walk on and be a part of the culture, and really wanted to follow.
"It took a lot of work to build SMU from the back of their conference, last in D1, to an NCAA top 10 performances during the six years I was there," Cupini noted, "and now there are good athletes who are still there who maybe couldn't transfer because of majors or other things.
"In return, there's also a lot of women at Tennessee that could have left and they didn't. They also had the opportunity to transfer and leave with a head coaching change, but we chatted with them and they stayed.
"There's a lot of women in this NCAA group that were already at Tennessee. They raced and rowed there the last handful of years, and maybe didn't do what they wanted to do, hadn't made the tournament or achieved what they wanted to achieve. They are just really happy to work together with the coaching staff and the team to get Tennessee there, and they have been some of the strongest leaders on the team."
"It was their choice," said Cupini about the women who opted to transfer. "I was so humbled and honored that so many women, even some ready to graduate, wanted to go on another year to come and be a part of this.
"They really have joined well with the women who were previously on the team here at Tennessee before them. We definitely consider our team one team, but since we're reflecting back and talking about the two teams, it was just incredible to see just how accepting everybody was and just really wanted to hit the ground running.
"It's nice to tell the real story of the option that they had," said Cupini, "and how excited they were to continue to build and do it at another place where maybe they could go farther. That's what their goal was."
A season at a brand new school, even with a strong and energized team is not without its challenges.
"The biggest challenge has just been the little daily things that we encounter that we have to figure out with the change," said Cupini. "Piecing together all the rules that Tennessee has and what they would like, their customs and how they do things."
There was also the stress of the move itself, said Cupini. "For all the staff and for the kids, the move was not easy. We forget that moving and starting a new job are some of the top stressors besides relationships, and those relationships are also affected. It's very stressful, and that was a challenge.
"What isn't challenging is getting them to work together. It isn't challenging to get them to like each other. They're so funny. They like each other. They have so much fun. We work hard and we all goof around at the same time, so that part hasn't been challenging."
We asked about the keys to helping both these athletes and the program at Tennessee perform at this new, higher level this weekend.
"It's been really making sure anyone who hasn't gone really to NCAAs understands what it takes to go through the tournament," said Cupini. "Every team has transfers or freshmen, new people that haven't been there before. So for us, it's just making sure that they understand the regatta, but not over-focusing on it either at the same time. Doing what we've been doing all year and not changing anything or making it different from what we've been doing. It's a balance there, to keep focusing on what we've been focusing all year, at all the races."
We also asked about how she has helped the team manage the increased expectations they earned with their successful season.
"We decided early on, about the particular things that we would want to do through the year, and those expectations are things that we get excited about. It's not expectations that put pressure on us," Cupini said.
"We really allow the athletes to self-dictate: I don't want them to feel pressured by the coaching staff on what our goals are. This year we all decided early on how we want to do things and then it's been about performing to the best of our ability and just seeing what we can do. That's what we're taking to heart this year, and that's what matters. It's less about the placement at NCAAs, though obviously we have goals, and really about just doing what we set out to do.
"I want the women to leave this championships feeling good, like they came here and did what they wanted to do. I do feel the pressure of that, because I want them to achieve what I know they can. I want them to feel very accomplished in that."
Racing starts at 8 am Friday, and all the details on how to watch the championships unfold across all three NCAA divisions can be found here in row2k's "How to Watch and What to Know" Guide.
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