Fox Chapel native Carol Schoenecker named rowing coach at RMU

Four years ago, Robert Morris rowing coaches Nelle Stahura and Carol Schoenecker sat down at a table for breakfast outside of a local restaurant and talked about what the sport meant to them.

They talked about everything from the opportunities the sport has provided them over the course of their lives to how it’s allowed them to help young women experience something the pair already had. After that conversation, they realized they shared the same vision for the RMU rowing program.

“I was deciding between going into Temple’s PhD program in urban education or taking the assistant coaching job at RMU,” said Schoenecker, a Fox Chapel native. “Because of everything Nelle and I were talking about in terms of what’s important to us and tying it to the equity piece and the issues we saw in education, we were like, ‘This is it, we are going to change this program, we are going to do something different, especially for Division I rowing.’ It’s going to be great, and we’re aligned with it.”

Now, four years later, Stahura has been promoted to associate athletic director for compliance and student-athlete development at RMU, and Schoenecker is set to take over the rowing program after spending those four years as an assistant.

Schoenecker has had quite the journey in rowing. She was a four-time Patriot League champion and a three-time ECAC champion at Bucknell. She was an assistant coach at Duquesne from 2011-14. And over the past four years, Schoenecker has helped the Colonials reach new heights in more ways than one.

In the water, she helped guide the team to Grand Final at the 2019 Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference in the Varsity 8, Second Varsity 8 and Varsity 4. The Second Varsity 8 team claimed bronze at the 2019 MAAC Championships with a 7-minute, 26.521-second run.

Schoenecker also oversaw RMU’s novice program, which teaches walk-on athletes how to row even if they didn’t compete in high school. Don’t expect that to change anytime soon as Schoenecker has gained a lot of experience coaching underneath Stahura, which she said was a unique opportunity.

“Nelle’s leadership style is very collaborative, so I never felt like an assistant coach, per se. We were both in everything together,” Schoenecker said. “There wasn’t an aspect of the head coaching position that I didn’t know about because she pulled me into every conversation whether it was with our sports administrators or the financial pieces with recruiting. She kind of gave me the autonomy to design different curriculums to kind of build things the way I wanted, which is really unique here because it’s not something most assistant coaches get other places.”

When Stahura and Schoenecker started coaching together four years ago, the Fox Chapel native said they put together an intensive five-year plan they believed would allow their program to thrive down the road.

This year would’ve been Year 5 of the plan, but with their conference championship being canceled this year, it wasn’t a good benchmark to see if it was working.

But since the beginning of her tenure at RMU, the program has grown from 23 athletes to 47 before walk-ons joined the team this year. So the program seems to be in a good place as Schoenecker gets set to take over.

“The culture is a lot stronger. The athletes are very driven in what’s important to them,” Schoenecker said. “So when it comes to being more competitive, they recognize how every aspect of their collegiate experience ties into boat speed.”

As a former teacher, Schoenecker always has been set on allowing her students to take the lead in the classroom and take ownership of their learning. In rowing, she has tried to apply the same type of philosophy.

“I look at everything similarly to the classroom, and every teacher’s dream is your classroom is student-led and the students are taking ownership of their learning,” Schoenecker said. “Then, you end up in the support role as the teacher and the educator, and I think that as a team, culturally, is the same way. Everything is very athlete-led, athlete-driven, and now, instead of being a top-down approach, it’s a very collaborative one.”