The Ultimate Team Sport: Rowing

You'll probably see a rower walking around campus sporting a t-shirt with various sayings such as:

"Rowers do more before 8:00am than most people do all day"

"Crew is life...everything else is just details"

"Race for the psychological advantage. Sit up tall, pull in high, stay within the margins of power, and they will inevitably look over at some point to see what kind of God is blasting your boat forward"-Chris Allsopp

The picture above is the USA Women's Eight from the 2008 Olympic Games this past summer in Beijing. Draped around their necks are GOLD MEDALS! Their wire-to-wire win in the grand finals was a feat that hadn't been accomplished by an American women's team since 1984.

The women in this boat won't make millions in endorsements or be on the cover of magazines, but they truly are heroic athletes and incredible women. They come from all walks of life, different states, different backgrounds. Most of them have jobs and families. The girl fourth from the left in the picture is still in college! (She's a junior at Stanford, we've raced her!) They don't row for the glory, they row because they love it, it's as simple as that.
Here we are at the West Coast Conference Championships in May 2009. I'm sitting in the "four seat". For those of you who don't speak rowing, I'm the girl in the visor, fourth from the left. My job is to be consistent, follow our stroke, Mehana (the girl in the front in the white hat) and set the tone for the three girls sitting behind me. Together, we're the "bow 4". The pint-sized bullhorn of energy perched in the front of the boat is Ashley, our coxswain. Known to us as "Ash Mo," her job is to steer the boat and keep us motivated. In this picture, she's about to call her awesome "catch BOOM" that reminds us to stay calm and powerful through the water.
Crew has been quite a JOURNEY in my life.

We work hard, but we play hard too! While the rest of campus is at home relaxing during Spring Break or partying in Cabo, we're practicing three times a day, every day. While it's super hard work, we make sure to make it fun by dressing up according to themes. This picture on the right is from the appropriately titled, "Ridiculous Day" during this year's Spring Break. I'm the one in the middle with the Ravens jersey (see, I told you I'm a sports fan!) and the lopsided pigtails. We've had 80's Day, Rubix Cube Day, Twin Day, and various other days to use as an excuse to just be completely crazy.

After practice each day during spring break, we shower and gather at a teammate's house for delicious homecooked food, lots of back massage lines, and a good movie. We laugh and relax and take time to realize how awesome it is that we're on this team, with these great teammates and how lucky we are to be Division I female athletes. While we may not get the support financially or fan-wise from our school and our friends will never understand why our alarms go off so early each morning, it's during these grueling spring break workouts that we come to appreciate why we do what we do.

US Women's Eight photo borrowed from blog.syracuse.com