On her first day as a member of the Arkansas Boathouse Club’s ABC Juniors, Haley Lawson learned to use the erg, a rowing machine.
On her second day with the rowing club in North Little Rock, the 14-year-old high school freshman went out onto the Arkansas River as part of a crew. She learned to handle an oar and use it to help make the boat go.
For her next trip onto the water, she started bossing the crew around as its coxswain. Experienced rowers whispered what she should yell, and she yelled it.
Then on her next rowing day, Sept. 21, Haley found herself in a boat under the Broadway Bridge, yelling directions to a crew of four girls. Her crew won its exhibition race against a crew from Northwest Arkansas in the Junction Bridge Regatta.
“And I didn’t hit a bridge!” she crows.
“Coxswains, obviously, are small people with big personalities,” says Yates Phillips, the club member who coaches the Boathouse’s ABC Juniors program. They have to be, because the cox is the only person in the rowing boat who can see where it’s going.
Phillips will be delighted if Haley continues to enjoy learning to cox, because the job is easy to do but hard to do well, and because the club needs more coxswains. “But I won’t pigeonhole her,” he says. “We’ll teach her to row, too.”
Open to teens in grades eight through 12, the 3-year-old ABC Juniors program currently has nine students, all of whom happen to be girls. But boys are welcome and have participated in the past. It’s a yearround program with two racing seasons - August to November and February to June.
The teens travel to compete in races.
For $400 a season, students can attend about 40 workouts, three weekdays after school and also Saturday mornings. Practices typically last 60 to 90 minutes, “longer on Saturday,” Phillips says. Some of his students come to every session while others skip a few - he understands high schoolers have a lot to juggle. But rowing is not merely a good experience, it requires experience.
“Progress is directly related to time in the boat,” he says.
COMMITMENT
Dominique Poirot, 18, a freshman at Pulaski Tech, has rowed with ABC Juniors three years, long enough to notice that blisters (from the oars) give way to calluses during racing season, but after a layoff, the blisters come back. “You mess up your hands a lot, but I like being out on the water a lot, and then the team members, you get really close to them. You have to communicate and have good teamwork,” she says.
Sophie Rudder, 15, a sophomore at Mount St. Mary Academy, gets excited when she thinks about seeing “about 10,000 people” at the Head of the Hooch regatta in Chattanooga, Tenn. She wants rowing to become that big in Arkansas - which would behard, because rowing is not an Arkansas Activities Association sanctioned sport.
High schools don’t field varsity rowing teams, and the Boathouse cannot recruit on campuses.
Rudder is undeterred: “It combines teamwork, which is really cool, but it’s also having fun. And you can start no matter how athletic or nonathletic you are. You can start and train up from there,” she says, adding, “well, you do have to be able to swim.”
COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIPS
Beyond exercise and camaraderie, there are scholarships. According to information on the website of athletic consulting firm Scholarship for Athletes, 1,700 scholarships are available from 85 universities with NCAA Division I rowing teams, and 320 are available from 16 Division II universities.
Madison Crane, 20, was one of the Boathouse Club’s first teenagers. Now a sophomore at the University of Tulsa majoring in psychology, the daughter of Christopher and Pamela Crane of Little Rock is a cox for the Golden Hurricane - a Division I school.
Crane’s partial scholarship for rowing “just covers books and stuff but it helps a lot,” she says.
A guide to college recruiting provided by U.S. Rowing warns that Division 1 is highly competitive: “Only a few rowers will have both the academic and rowing credentials to be actively recruited by the most selective academic institutions in Division I,” the guide says. “But if you love this sport, there will be many other schools where you can be admitted, row happily, learn a lot and prosper in adult life.”
Crane didn’t take up the sport for a shot at financial aid. Her grandfather, Pulaski County Circuit Clerk Larry Crane, had helped to found the club, and he promised she’d love it.
“That was really funny because practices were at 5 a.m. and it was really hard for me to get up,” she says. “But once you got on the water in the morning, the feeling of the water was really beautiful - the stillness of the water, I guess. You just watched everything come to life. I felt peaceful on the water.
“It’s not a very peaceful sport,” she corrects herself. “It looks peaceful, but itdoesn’t feel very peaceful. But I just felt good when I was doing it.” FAST LEARNERS
Maryssa Barron had absolutely no experience with rowing last spring when she decided to become a cox for the college she’d chosen to attend, Harvard University. Harvard does not have rowing scholarships, but it has a storied NCAA Division I crew.
Oarsmen are typically tall and athletic. Barron is 4-foot-11 (“11.5,” she says) - perfect for a cox.
But how could she learn to row before college? She hadn’t played sports at Little Rock Central High. “I was really involved in music. I was an oboist,” she explains.
“She didn’t even know the club existed,” Phillips says. But of course Barron found the Boathouse as soon as shestarted looking. The Boathouse is rowing in central Arkansas.
She spent about two months with ABC Juniors - minus two weeks for vacation. That was enough experience, she says, that the rowing coach at Harvard gave her a tryout. Today she’s coxing Harvard’s freshmen recruits, happily waking at 6:30 six mornings a week to make it to the dock by 7:20 for a few hours of practice on the river before her first class.
While she feels “a little behind the other coxswains,” she knows she’s doing well, with a shot to letter in rowing at a Division I program. She credits the foundation ABC Juniors was able to give her in a very short time.
QUICK START
“I like to start people observing the first time, just take a ride in the powerboat since we always have the powerboat out,” Phillips says. “And then have them erg” - practice the basic stroke on a rowing machine.
He fits students in among an experienced team. Theyprogress to “dock rowing,” which involves practicing the stroke without moving downriver. “I have them do a little dock rowing and then get out and take one brief row and then do a little more coaching and go for another row,” Phillips says.
He travels beside them in a powerboat and uses his cellphone to take video of each rower. “I have a TV in the boathouse that I can connect my phone to and show them video right after they get off the boat, and that works pretty well. We might review before the next practice.”
While the club’s 60-foot, eight-oar sweep boat has become a familiar sight on the Arkansas River, Phillips says people learn the sport faster in the club’s smaller boats, “the quad, the double scull, singles, the sweep four, and on the occasional day we’ll use the sweep eight,” he says.
“The smaller the boat you’re in, the quicker you have to learn. You’re going to sink or swim, so to speak. Once you’re responsible for your own propulsion and no one else is carrying you along, then you start to figure things out pretty quick.”
He notes that rowing is a good complementary sport for other team athletics, and unlike many of those other sports, it’s not strictly a youthful pursuit. Teens the clubteaches to row today could compete into middle age and beyond.
More information is at (501) 837-3779, [email protected] and arboathouse.org.
ActiveStyle, Pages 27 on 09/30/2013