Khaled Sanad is the only head coach in Colgate Men’s Rowing varsity history.
Sanad recently completed his 24th season guiding the Raiders’ rowing program, lifting it from club status to the varsity ranks and seemingly reaching new heights in every successive campaign.
Recent Success
The 2024 season saw the Raiders’ varsity four boat place fourth at the IRA National Championship Regatta. Colgate’s varsity eight also finished fourth at the SIRA Championship Regatta.
The Raiders’ 1V8 had another successful campaign during the 2023 season, winning the SIRA Championship Regatta for the second straight year. The boat placed 20th at the IRAs and earned an automatic bid to the Henley Royal Regatta, where it won its first race.
In October 2022, Colgate Athletics announced that the men's rowing coach position will be renamed the Khaled Sanad Endowed Head Men's Rowing Coach.
Colgate’s 1V8 claimed first at the SIRA Regatta and the Knecht Cup before placing 20th at the IRA National Championship during the 2022 season. The 2021 season saw the Raiders’ 1V8 and 1V4 both finish 17th at the IRAs.
Sanad toils away in relative anonymity, pushing his student-athletes to an expectation for success and creating a top-level program amid the giants of U.S. collegiate rowing.
Among other accomplishments for Sanad was Colgate’s incredible streak of triumph beginning in the summer of 2018 with Alex Damjanovic ’20 and Luke Smith ’20 winning the U23 National Time Trials in lightweight pairs. The Damjanovic-Smith duo followed that up with gold and silver, respectively, at the U.S. Rowing Indoor Championships in the Under 23 Lightweight Men's category.
A Season to Remember
Momentum carried over into the spring of 2019 as Colgate's Varsity 8+ made its way to the Kerr Cup Grand Final, setting the stage for a gold medal-winning performance at the Dad Vail Regatta. The Raiders that afternoon won the Richard O'Brien Trophy for the first time in program history with a record-breaking time of 5:30.598.
Winning a Dad Vail Regatta in the Varsity 8+ is the equivalent of bringing home a Patriot League or ECAC Hockey championship. And to do so in record-breaking fashion shows how dominant Sanad’s charges were.
Colgate with that victory moved into the top 20 in both major polls and earned automatic qualification into the IRA National Championships near Sacramento, California. There, the Raiders advanced to the Third-Level Final and finished as the No. 18 team in the country.
It was one of the best seasons in Colgate Athletics history.
Colgate under Sanad earned 15 total Dad Vail medals from 2008-19, capped by the 2019 heroics. Prior to 2008, the Raiders competed in the ECAC Championships.
From Second-to-Last … to Second
Colgate Rowing the year before Sanad’s arrival in 2001 finished next to last at the ECAC Championships. In the first season under Sanad, Colgate shot up to second place.
Sanad’s first National Coach of the Year award came in 2002 when he guided the Raiders to a third-place result at ECACs. He backed that up the very next season by coaching the varsity four without coxswain to the first IRA gold medal in program history.
Ryan Cole '04, Dave Galos '05, Paul Kelly '05 and Mike McCarthy '05 posted a time of 6:43.07 to clip second-place Yale by three seconds on the Cooper River in Camden, New Jersey. That foursome was inducted into the Colgate Athletics Hall of Honor in 2015, at which time Cole said of Sanad, “Khaled is like Vince Lombardi coaching a Pop Warner team. He's an intense guy but highly intelligent and a great coach."
To show the nation that the Raiders weren’t a one-hit wonder, the Colgate boat finished second at the IRAs the very next season. The program’s first win at the prestigious Head of the Charles soon followed in the fall of 2005, and the Raiders haven’t looked back since.
The Face of Egyptian Rowing
Sanad himself achieved incredible success at the pinnacles of rowing. He began his career at age 15 and displayed such prowess that he was placed into the national team training program in his native Egypt only a year later.
During a decade of competition, Sanad won seven Egyptian national titles and become the face of the sport in his country. At the peak of his career, Sanad attended the Sports Science School in Cairo and qualified for the 1992 Olympics in both rowing and boxing.
Following the end of his rowing career, Sanad’s remarkable journey continued with a stint in the Egyptian Army. While serving, he worked as an engineer, searching for land mines and clearing areas where they had been planted.
After training almost exclusively in Egypt and Europe during his career, Sanad was given an invitation to coach the Dutch National Team. He declined, deciding instead to come to the United States in 1994 to learn alternative training techniques. It was here that he began his illustrious coaching career, beginning with a position at Grand Valley State, a college where he could simultaneously coach and continue his research on physiology. Sanad later moved on and coached the Egyptian National Team.
During his time as the Egyptian head coach, Sanad worked with Aly Ibrahim, one of his close friends and the heir to Sanad as the premier single sculler in Egypt. Under Sanad’s tutelage, Ibrahim enjoyed the most successful stage of his career, and in 2004 he asked Sanad to work with him to prepare for the upcoming Olympics. Sanad agreed, and brought Ibrahim to Colgate to train. With Sanad again advising him, Ibrahim finished 14th at the Athens Olympics.
‘Best Thing That Ever Happened’
The experience was a prodigious one for Sanad as well.
“It was my first time as a head coach at the Olympics,” Sanad says. “Aly was carrying the flag and I was walking right behind him, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. There is nothing in the world, at least for me, that would be as good as walking the 400 meters around that track at the Opening Ceremony.”
In his final stop before coming to Colgate, Sanad coached the Penn AC elite, one of the most prestigious rowing clubs in the country, for the 2000 Olympic trials. It was at the Olympic trials that he was first informally offered the Colgate position, which he initially refused.
But after discussing the offer with two Colgate students who were rowing for him at the time, he decided to reconsider the offer.
“I thought that they were really good guys who just needed someone to lead them, and they were willing to do anything to get better,” Sanad said.
Grown Fond of Colgate
After visiting Colgate, he decided to try collegiate coaching again, a decision that helped shape the direction in which the new program would go.
“I thought I would stay for maybe one or two years,” Sanad said. “But I like Colgate more than any other place that I have coached, and what I like most about it are the students. They are some of the best athletes that I have worked with in terms of my relationship with them and their willingness to work hard.”
There are few other schools in the country that can claim to have a coach with Sanad’s credentials. His knowledge of the sport and innovation in coaching has allowed Colgate – a small, liberal arts school – to compete with programs that have a tremendous advantage in scholarships and tradition.
Sanad came to a program that was in disorder as it attempted to make the transition to a varsity team and made an immediate impact. Twenty years later, the quiet man with the warm smile is still molding champions, still producing winners, still achieving greatness.
Sanad and his wife, Dr. Omnia Sanad, a pediatric physician, are the parents of sons Youssef, Yasseen and Yahia.
