Penn women’s rowing hires Bill Manning, who brings national coaching experience to the program

Nearly two months after Penn women’s rowing coach Wesley Ng stepped down to take over at Virginia, the Quakers have hired someone who is well acquainted with the Philly-area rowing scene.

Bill Manning, who most recently was a high-performance coach at Penn AC, will be the new women’s coach, the program announced.

Manning takes over a program that finished 10th at the NCAA championships this past season and sixth the previous season. With over a quarter-century of coaching experience, including 15 years at Harvard in several assistant coaching roles and eight with Princeton, Manning is excited to use his wealth of knowledge to continue elevating the Penn women’s program.

“When this opportunity became available, my interest in really working with student-athletes — it’s always been paramount,” Manning said. “I did not want to leave Philly, I wasn’t going to leave Philly. My wife is very happily employed here. It’s sort of the confluence of those things, a great institution, definitely an athletic department, a rowing program on the upswing. I was really, really thrilled to get the opportunity and pretty excited to try to make the most of it.”

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In addition to coaching at Princeton and Harvard, Manning has coached USRowing’s senior and junior national teams for nearly 28 years. He was an assistant coach with the men’s pair, men’s double, and men’s lightweight double at the 2004 Olympics in Athens and coached multiple medal-winning boats at the 2015 and 2023 Pan American Games. He also served as Team USA’s head coach at the 2018 Youth Olympics.

Over his last three seasons at Penn AC, Manning coached 10 world championship competitors, along with one Olympic rower, Evan Olson, who won bronze at the 2024 Paris Games on Team USA’s eight-man boat.

“I’ve always thought of myself professionally as a rowing coach, as opposed to a junior coach or college coach, a senior coach, as opposed to a sculling coach or a sweep coach, as opposed to a men’s coach or a women’s coach. I’ve always thought that this is my discipline,” Manning said. “Being able to do these different teams and work with these different age groups and different genders and different disciplines within the sport, every time I come away, I feel a more capable, more experienced, more well-rounded coach than I would have been otherwise, so I really enjoy mixing it up that way.

“Everything I’ve done on the national team, or even the junior national, it sort of informs what I do.”

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Manning noted coaching alongside former Harvard head coach Harry Parker, who rowed collegiately at Penn and died in 2013, and Princeton’s Lori Dauphiny, who’s entering her 28th season with the women’s program, as impactful experiences.

“I’ve just been really fortunate to work with what I would argue are two of the very best coaches in collegiate rowing ever,” Manning said.

The Penn women’s program had two alumnae — Regina Salmons, on the U.S. women’s eight boat, and Samantha Morton, an alternate for the Australian rowing national team — make the trip to this summer’s Olympics. Manning, who also had a brief stint as La Salle’s women’s and men’s rowing interim head coach for four months in 2021, plans to maintain Penn women’s rowing success by emphasizing his personality. Associate head coach Kumari Lewis, who’s been with the program since 2017, will remain on the staff.

“I don’t think it’s well-understood that the best athletes on this team, the best athletes on the [Schuylkill] River, they are absolutely world class,” Manning said. “And it’s pretty remarkable. There are students at Penn right now who are going to the Olympics.

“They just don’t know it yet,” Manning added with a laugh.