photo by: Kansas Athletics

Kansas Athletics announced the hire of Andrew Derrick as head rowing coach on Friday, June 27, 2025.

Kansas athletic director Travis Goff announced on Friday that KU has hired Gonzaga head coach Andrew Derrick as its new rowing coach.

In his five seasons with the Bulldogs, Derrick led his team to four straight West Coast Conference titles followed by one second-place finish. Gonzaga compiled a conference record of 127-5 in NCAA events during his first four years.

A graduate of the University of Washington who is originally from Cincinnati, Derrick previously served as a head coach at Central Oklahoma and Seattle Pacific and an assistant at UCF and Oklahoma.

“Andy has been entrenched in the highest levels of the rowing community for the past 25 years and has an intense passion for the sport and a deep understanding of how to build a program for sustained success,” Goff said in a press release. “He is committed to a student-athlete’s complete development and connects with his rowers on and off the water. Andy and his family will fit perfectly into the culture of Kansas Athletics, and we can’t wait to get him here and enter an incredibly exciting new era of Kansas Rowing.”

At Seattle Pacific at the Division II level, Derrick grew the roster from four athletes to 35 in just over two years. The Falcons came in fourth in the nation in 2019. Previously, at Central Oklahoma, he had led the program to its first-ever NCAA Tournament bid in 2011 and by 2016 had gotten the Bronchos to No. 2 in the national tournament.

“My family and I are thrilled to be joining the Kansas Athletics and Lawrence communities,” Derrick said in the release. “We were blown away with the people we met, resources dedicated, and the care given through the process to take us from not looking, to accepting this truly amazing opportunity.”

Maya Ozery, the sport administrator for rowing who is KU’s senior associate athletics director for student-athlete development and inclusive excellence, guided the search committee that settled on Derrick.

Derrick replaces Carrie Cook-Callen, after Goff announced on May 21 that KU would not renew her contract. That was the first time during Goff’s tenure that a coach’s departure had been publicly announced as a contract nonrenewal.

Cook-Callen rowed for KU in the early 2000s, later returning to the school as an assistant in 2012 and then spending eight seasons as the head coach from 2017 to 2025. The Jayhawks finished third of six teams at the Big 12 Championship in Sarasota, Florida, in her final season.

Derrick becomes the sixth head coach Goff has hired since assuming the role of athletic director in April 2021, after Lance Leipold (football), Lindsay Kuhle (women’s golf), Dan Fitzgerald (baseball), Nate Lie (soccer) and Matt Ulmer (volleyball).

“Our program will be defined by hard work and we’re confident that very bright days are ahead for Kansas Rowing,” Derrick said.

As Chancellor Douglas Girod put it in a recent KU Athletics board of directors meeting, Goff has been “batting a thousand,” with Leipold leading KU to a pair of bowl games, Kuhle guiding the Jayhawks to individual and team regional titles, Fitzgerald recently receiving an extension after building the team that produced KU’s best regular season ever and Lie winning a Big 12 tournament championship in his first year at the helm. Ulmer will begin his own first season at KU’s head coach in August, and the rowing season begins later in the fall.