Three New Head Coaches Take the Field

Three Harvard teams will take the field this fall with new head coaches on the sidelines, after the Harvard athletics department dealt with significant turnover during the summer by both promoting from within and hiring from afar.

The men’s heavyweight crew team underwent the most significant change, beginning the season without longtime coach Harry Parker. Parker, who led the team for 52 years, passed away over the summer.

Charley Butt, the former coach of men’s lightweight crew, will replace Parker. Butt will become only the ninth coach in the history of Harvard heavyweight crew, which was established in 1852 with the first ever athletic contest between Harvard and Yale.

Butt has worked with Harvard as the coach of the lightweight crew team for the last 28 seasons, leading the team to nine national championships, including the last two. The team has had dual meet winning records in 25 seasons over the same time frame.

Butt also served as a United States Olympic coach four times and coached Michelle Guerette ’02 to a silver medal in the women’s single sculls in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The men’s lightweight crew coaching position vacated by Butt has yet to be filled.

The athletic department also hired from within for the men’s swimming head coach, choosing former assistant coach Kevin Tyrrell to lead the squad after the team’s coach of 15 years, Tim Murphy, left to take the same position at Penn State. Before serving as the team’s assistant coach, Tyrrell was the head coach of the U.S. Virgin Islands national men’s and women’s teams from 2005-2009.

Harvard stayed within Cambridge city limits to fill Tyrrell’s old position, tapping former Massachusetts Institute of Technology coach Samantha Pitter to replace him as assistant coach. Pitter served as an assistant coach for the Engineers for four seasons and spent her fifth as head coach while incumbent Dawn Dill was on maternity leave, leading the team to a best-ever NCAA finish.

By contrast, the new men’s soccer coach, Pieter Lehrer, was hired from California. Lehrer, a former associate head coach at the University of California, Berkeley, was hired in April after a three-month search. During Lehrer’s time at Cal, the team capturing three Pac-12 titles and reached the NCAA tournament five times—something that the Crimson have not accomplished since winning the Ivy League championship in 2009. Lehrer will replace Carl Junot, who resigned following a 3-11-3 (0-6-1 Ivy League) season in January.

Lehrer will have an entirely new staff to work with in 2013. Over the summer, the team hired three new assistant coaches—Jonathan Delano, Darren Murray, and A.J. Soares. Drew Chrostek, the new Director of Men’s Soccer Operations, was also hired from Northeastern—where he was a graduate assistant—over the summer.

—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at davidfreed@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @CrimsonDPFreed.