How grit and hard work led coach Kevin Sauer to the Olympic stage

How do you build the steps to an Olympic podium? For Kevin Sauer (M’76), Purdue Crew coach from 1977 to 1982 and the first coach of the women’s rowing team, it all started with a hammer. 

“In 1979, I was the head coach of the rowing club and making $4,000,” Sauer chuckles a bit. “I was building hog barns, houses, and YMCA cabins and working at a shoe store on the side to fund my coaching habit.” 

Before that $4,000 salary, though, when Sauer was an undergrad, he was the captain of the men’s team. In fall of 1974, when the men were having their first team meeting, a group of women showed up and announced they wanted to row. As captain, Sauer told them that of course they could row — and that practice was at 5:30 a.m. the next morning. 

“They showed up,” Sauer says. “And they kept showing up. After a few weeks, I knew they were real — what was happening around the country was real.” The next year, Sauer coached the novice women’s rowing team. “Back then, we didn’t have much equipment, so we lifted weights and ran stairs — lots of them — in the stadium.” Over the next six years, Sauer’s construction skills came into play again as he and the men’s and women’s teams developed the boathouse — which originally had a dirt floor — into a training center. “We didn’t row that well,” he smiles, “but we were tough.”

Sauer went on to coach the freshman men at Yale and then returned to Purdue to coach the men’s team for two more years. Since 1988, he has been the head coach at the University of Virginia, where he’s built a powerhouse program, but his Purdue roots continue to influence how he coaches rowers for the most elite competition: the Olympics. 

“I was on the national team, so I knew what was possible,” Sauer says. “Here was this guy from Purdue at the selection camp for the ’76 Olympics rowing with guys from the East Coast schools. From that experience, I knew you could take kids like myself, and if you build the right environment, they can do great things.”

Sauer didn’t make the ’76 Olympic team, but he did compete in the ’77 world championships. He finally made it to the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 as a coach of women’s double sculls, and he watched Amanda Elmore (S’13) win gold in the women’s eight. 

“Here’s a kid who had all the goods but didn’t know it until she tried it,” Sauer says. “Elmore walked on at Purdue, and six years later, she’s in the stroke seat of the women’s eight that wins Olympic gold.

“There’s nothing easy about this sport except watching the kids that decide to sink their teeth into it. The reason I loved coaching at Purdue was because of the kind of people that were there.” 

Sauer is still building, but now it isn’t hog barns and houses. As a coach who knows that the right environment is more important than any other training element, he’s building athletes who are capable of pursuing their own spot on an Olympic podium.