More Than a Sport: How Rowing Can Transform Communities

Written by: Joshua Rafferty

One night last October, I checked my email to find a message from my former college coach, Megan Patrick of Loyola University Maryland. After graduating from Loyola in May, I was a bit shocked to see an email from her while knee-deep in her fall boat selections. She had forwarded an email from a man named Bill Pickard, one of the founders of the Pocock Foundation. He had read my blog post from last year and was looking to connect with me regarding a project he had been working on in south Seattle. Shortly after, I got on the phone with Bill, and learned about his experience rowing at Dartmouth and then with the United States National Team. He told me about a neighborhood in Seattle called Rainier Beach, a majority-black neighborhood with a waterfront park, all within walking distance from schools and homes, and with decent access to public transportation. The park even has one of the city's former bathhouses ripe for renovations. It truly is a perfect spot for a city rowing program. However, as Bill kept describing his project, he began to lay out some of his limitations. He had a hard time with city bureaucracy within the parks department and was having a tough time getting the community into the sport. Both were rolled into a whole list of problems that needed to be addressed to put on a successful rowing program. Our conversation came to a point where he said, “So how do I do it?” referring to how to get everything started and moving. For a second, I paused; I didn’t know how to put it simply or if I even was going to be correct in what I wanted to say. I then recalled my experience with Bruce Boyd, a community organizer in Mercer County, New Jersey, where I live. This past summer, he was able to pull off Trenton’s first-ever middle school indoor rowing competition. I had the privilege of attending the event as a guest speaker for the competitors, and I have gotten to know Bruce over the last two years leading up to the event while things were in their infancy. I described a bit of what Bruce had done in Trenton and offered to connect Bill with him.

When I decided to write this blog post this year, I wanted to circle back on Bill and Bruce to see how they were doing and highlight their work. I first spoke to Bruce to hear more about his journey and how he got into rowing despite never competing in the sport himself.  He said it all started when he was sitting on his couch during the pandemic and saw a TV show about Chicago that featured the story from A Most Beautiful Thing. Bruce has been in community and child development for years and saw an opportunity to get the city behind something that could have a deep impact. He reached out to Arshay Cooper, where he then got connected with the Princeton National Rowing Association and Princeton University Men’s Heavyweight coach Greg Hughes. Upon his arrival at PNRA, he learned that the current STEM to Stern program wasn’t meeting the organization's goals and was able to help fill holes in their programming by getting families to start showing up. Eventually, with the handful of kids he had, Bruce was able to get city school administrators and school board members to come to see what was happening on Mercer Lake. Over time, the head of community outreach at PNRA left, and Bruce came in to take over as community liaison. Under his leadership, the program grew to over 40 participants.

To get more kids interested in the sport, Bruce brought ergs to middle schools to help form rowing clubs. He enlisted schoolteachers and nurses to take the Level 1 coaching training from USRowing and teach the kids the basics. Over time, interest grew among students and parents, and soon, there were six middle schools with kids on ergs a few times a week. Things came to a head in the summer of 2024 when the Christina Seix Academy hosted the first-ever Capital City Rowing League Indoor Championship. I was invited to speak to the students to give them some words of encouragement and discuss my time rowing in college. Ladies from the national team showed up to cheer on the competitors and give their support. Nate Chase, a black incoming freshman at the University of Washington, made an appearance to show what level the kids may find themselves if they stick with the sport. Later that day, I recruited him to come row with my club until he shipped to the West Coast. He was my first black boatmate in multiple years.

The competition consisted of teams from six different schools, where athletes competed over 500 meters against people of the same gender and age. To run the event, Bruce enlisted a DJ and MC to add an element of fun and get the crowd going. However, the crowd didn’t need music and a DJ to get rowdy. As the first flight of kids took off, parents and community members quickly drowned out the music with their cheers and yells. Simply put, it was a gym full of mostly black people enjoying rowing and the raw competition and emotions that come with it. I certainly never thought I would see a day like that, let alone be a part of it in the way I was. As I looked into the crowd, I saw school principals, school board, and city council members. I then realized that this was all bigger than the competition between the kids, and the medals won. It was about getting the city behind something and showcasing what good rowing in Trenton can do. It showed the community and its families can get into something where they will all see their hard work pay off. After all of the races were finished, there was a final 250m event for anybody in the crowd who wanted to join. Some parents jumped to their feet, while others took some encouragement. Eventually, every erg was full, and adults with no rowing experience (for the most part) were being cheered on by members of our national team in their first-ever race. That’s one heck of a first rowing experience if you ask me.

When I called Bruce for this article, he was excited to tell me some of the progress that has been made since last summer. Today, Bruce’s programs have reached seven middle schools with over 100 participants. The Capital City Rowing League will be hosting a second competition again in late June, but not before hopefully hosting an indoor winter classic. Bruce knew he didn’t want to go another year without competition to help keep kids interested by providing more opportunities to compete. Additionally, Bruce wants to take kids to competitions outside the city to help widen their view of how big the sport truly is. The objective for Bruce at the middle school level is to get kids on ergs and familiarized with the sport so that when the time comes, they will be ready to be on the water as high school rowers. His dream is to have two eights worth of both boys and girls racing for Trenton High School in the next five years or less. All of this made me even happier to hear the news that Trenton High School approved a rowing club and is actively looking for somebody to run it.

As a lifelong Mercer County resident, I was delighted to hear all of this. I believe Mercer County is the capital of rowing in America. With our world-class USA women’s squad, US rowing headquarters, and four high school programs ranging from scholastic to club, two master’s clubs, and one of the best rowing universities in the world, where I’m from breathes rowing. By increasing access to rowing in the city of Trenton, we can grow the rowing community in the area to be more than the posh sport reserved for the boarding schools and Lake Carnegie, but into something everyone can get behind and wants to be a part of. Last year, I wrote that I wanted to see black kids in boats racing, and that rowing to me is a sport and not an activity. The world needs to see and hear about what's going on in Trenton because it might change a community forever.

Rowing isn’t the first mostly white-dominated sport to try its hand in Trenton. When I was in middle school, Trenton Bridge Lacrosse, founded through the Bobby Campbell Lacrosse Foundation, was gaining traction in the community. I participated in the program due to its compatibility with my mom’s work schedule and the relatively low cost. Only playing for the team for one year, I recall it being hard to schedule games, which eventually led to a loss of interest from many of the guys with whom I played. That was ten years ago, and today, there still isn’t a high school team in Trenton. When I asked Bruce what makes rowing different, he said that one of his big selling points for parents is the idea that nobody sits on the bench in rowing. Of course, everybody wants to be in the fastest boat. However, in many rowing regattas, there are events for a second or third boat. This means that almost every athlete on the team will race even if they’re not at the top of the squad. This is different from a sport like basketball, where some players may never see the court, and much of the playing time is dominated by the starters and the few athletes that come off the bench. Additionally, the sport has a built-in positive feedback loop – the more you show up, the better you get. There isn’t much talent needed to show up and work hard. Bruce also argued that rowing takes you out of your environment, and people like that. On the water, you are away from your phone, and all other distractions, and whatever is bothering you isn’t there, it’s only the work and the water ahead of you. Bruce mentioned that the hands-on work with Princeton University and the opening of the boathouse doors by Greg Hughes was one of the largest driving factors. Bruce does not row, and he is very quick to tell you that. However, he cares about rowing more than most people I know. He told me, “It takes people outside the sport to bring people to the sport.” When it comes to growing the sport, reaching people like Bruce is critical to getting members of the community behind a new initiative. Bruce has made a career in community organizing. When I asked him what he walks away with in all of this, he said, “What I walk away with is what I started with. Getting young people involved in something they didn’t think they could do.”

Duplicating the story of Trenton sounds great on paper, but we can't copy and paste Bruce’s model everywhere. When I spoke to Bill Pickard from Seattle, he brought up a lot of the limitations that come with starting and continuing programs in underprivileged areas. For me, rowing was always a system I could tap into. My university had a novice program where I learned to row; when I came home, I was privileged enough to have my own car to drive me to and from practice every day, in addition to a work schedule mostly compatible with training. Outside of things like transportation and access, knowing how to swim was a common problem in Rainier Beach, among 12 other limitations he has run into. All these need to be addressed in some way for the program to gain traction, and many overlap with the limitations of young programs everywhere. Luckily, he was gracious enough to let me share them with all of you.

Distance, Place, Transportation

Transportation to and from practices is pivotal in having kids consistently show up to row. In Seattle, there is Mount Baker Rowing and Sailing Center, which was funded by the city many years ago, and serves the more affluent north Seattle and Mercer Island communities. Kids from this area are regularly driven or have their own cars. However, in the south end, public transit is the main mode of transportation for kids with parents who may work long hours. While public transit is good in Seattle compared to most cities in America, it’s still a 45-minute bus ride from Rainier Beach High School compared to the 12-minute drive with no traffic. Pritchard Beach Park, where a new boathouse would be, is an 11-minute walk from the high school. The area serves roughly 2,000 middle and 1,700 high school students within a 4-mile radius of the park. In Trenton, the Casperson rowing center is a 20-minute drive from Trenton Central High School, with zero public transit options available. This made transportation at the top of Bruce’s list; before boats and ergs could be purchased, Bruce needed to raise money for vans to transport kids. Where our rowing programs are matter; people want to rally around their community, not always travel to another one. However, not all communities can invest in their boathouses and facilities, and transportation is critical for maintaining consistent numbers needed to gain speed at all levels.  

Inflexible Schedules

Scheduling in Seattle was a larger hurdle when looking to build programming in an underprivileged community. Many students have jobs or family commitments that more affluent kids don’t. Maybe they have to watch a younger sibling or go to a job. Bill found that a lot of public programming had a mostly one-size-fits-all model when it came to scheduling and didn’t take into account a lot of the needs of those from the most underprivileged backgrounds. Even noting one institution’s representative’s words, “Their schedule does not fit our schedule.” This sort of rhetoric and attitude shuts out underprivileged black people from proper participation in public life. When we make programs for the public, they need to be for the entire public, not just those with higher property tax bills. Bill also found that private programs also have strict timetables, which is tough to work around. Rowing at the university level, scheduling is important to me, and being on time is critical for making teams function. However, when dealing with middle school and early high school-age students in underprivileged areas who are underexposed to the sport, we must meet people where they are. There are levels to everything, and we need to make sure we progress through the steps of getting kids to show up, then getting them to come consistently, and then coming on time every day as community attitudes shift.

Coaching, Teaching, and Mentoring

There is a serious shortage of black coaches and mentors in the sport. As mentioned before, Bruce began recruiting school faculty and staff to learn enough of the sport to teach kids. When building our programs, we need to cast a wide net for parents and members of the community to get involved in getting kids to row and row well. This isn’t just limited to making sure athletes have proper technique, but teaching coaches and mentors how to effectively communicate with kids to properly motivate them on an individual level. Identifying and retaining people who want to teach and mentor is critical at all levels of the sport. This doesn’t mean that you must become a rowing coach. But it does mean that rowing is bigger than arms, body, legs and legs, body, arms, anybody can learn that. Connecting with the kids and meeting them where they are as people is something just as valuable as the ability to teach and coach good rowing.

Costs

It’s no secret that rowing is an expensive sport. Decent racing shells will run a team $40,000 brand new, with a new Concept2 rowing machine priced at around $900. In my time in the sport, I've seen a lot of awesome donations in the form of boats and equipment. However, many of these donations aren’t consistent with the same teams and haven’t seen much sustained growth in competitive programming. The biggest costs for the sport come in the extras. There  are programming fees, race fees, racing kits, transportation, and accommodations at regattas. While it may not be particularly glamorous, donations for things like unis and fees go a long way for helping kids race, not to mention the sense of belonging gained when you get your first piece of team gear. In underprivileged areas, I think we can shift our fundraising efforts to the marginal costs of the sport. A brand-new shell looks great on the rack, but even better on the water if kids can afford the cost barriers to come and row it. On the flip side, I do think that we, as a black community, can also treat rowing like any other sport. In Rainier Beach, basketball is one of the biggest sports. The high school’s program sends kids to top colleges, with Jamal Crawford being a notable school alumnus. I have never played organized basketball personally, but I do know that AAU fees can reach thousands of dollars a year. It’s a sport I have understood for many years that the black community has invested in heavily. However, it's time we challenged the stereotype of basketball as a route to college and money for black kids. If we encouraged and invested in our tall black boys and girls to row the way we do basketball, I'm confident universities in the top 25 of the IRA/NCAA would see their boathouses full of black men and women on full ride scholarships.

Awareness & Recruiting, Age, Growth 

In the U.S., many programs and scholarships exist for those who can't always afford to pay in full. However, many families simply don’t know about these programs. In the U.K., British Rowing helps to facilitate the participation of over 1,000 public school kids a year, 64% of whom are of minority backgrounds. GB Start also looks to find older athletes with high potential and little to no experience and put them on a path to row at the highest level. Existing programs with scholarships available must go out and get the kids that don’t even know they want to row yet. Unfortunately, this isn’t the field of dreams; we can’t just build a boathouse and expect people to come. As mentioned before, it’s important to focus on middle school-aged kids. Students and parents are more open to trying new things at this point in their journey. Once kids reach around 15, you could lose them to another sport or activity, and if you’re in a seriously impoverished area, gang violence or drugs. When it comes to truly growing the sport, it’s just like building your fitness to row. At Loyola, we always talked about having a wide cardio base made of long steady-state hours. That was the platform that allowed you to go as fast as possible at your top end of speed. USRowing has historically focused its efforts on the top athletes competing at the Olympic level. However, we need to focus on building our base of rowers in America if we want to dominate on the world stage. Title IX and the explosion of women’s rowing at the NCAA level paved the way for the USA Women’s Eight to stand at the top of the podium for multiple Olympic cycles. More girls in college boats meant more girls competing at trials, which made our fastest women faster. The same goes for building the sport across all races and genders.

Swimming

Swimming is one of the largest hurdles for black kids in underprivileged communities. Any rowing program that is looking to gain a foothold in one of these areas must have a system for teaching kids how to swim. Not only is it a life skill, but it is essential to row safely. Not passing a swim test will mean you have to wear a life vest in some places or remain stranded on land in others. Fear of water is just as large a barrier as access to pools in many places. Big things like forming partnerships with swim clubs, or small things  like demonstrating a flip test in a pool with a single go a long way towards normalizing swimming and demonstrating how to be safe while rowing.

Culture

Rowing is unlike any other sport I’ve played. Coming from lacrosse and ice hockey, learning how to compete was hard. In my previous sports, the grit was very outward. You wanted to rip the head off your competitors and weren’t afraid to say it to them. Hockey is notorious for violence through fighting, and each sport is rather easy for spectators. In rowing, I had to learn how to be quiet and that the best way to twist the dagger after winning a race is to row off like it’s just any other day at the office. There is plenty of “rah-rah,” as my mom puts it, in rowing. It comes in the erg rooms full of 30 guys going as hard as possible, hooting and hollering for each other. The roar of the crowd as you reach the last 250 of a big race, the countless dance parties in the weight room with my college teammates and whatever Drake song just came out. Not to mention my favorite, the trash talk between two even boats racing at practice. When I first started rowing, the sport had none of these aspects. I wasn’t good enough at rowing to be in a place to race boats at practice, the erg was still a medieval torture device, and when someone said “good race” after kicking my butt by six lengths, I would want to drop the gloves. For black people coming into the sport for the first time, it can be tough to wrap your head around a culture that you may not get to experience until you have more experience. When it comes to being black and breaking into a white-dominated sport, you will have to deal with differences between you and your white teammates. As a black athlete, you may be the only one at your club, and that’s something we need to be more comfortable with. Parents, you may not instantly click with the white parents. Some may not go out of their way to speak to you, and that’s their problem. Heck, they might even ignore you. Kids will have racist teammates, some more outward with it than others. I say this all from experience. Many of my college teammates didn’t like rap music at all and refused to let it be played at first. Over time, however, as I integrated into the team, more and more rap songs began to blast from our erg and weight rooms. With the Carnegie Lake Rowing Association, I am the only consistent black member. I’ve seen some black folks at the annual turkey row racing with our learn-to-row boats, but for the most part, I didn’t see many in the summers training during the master’s competitive season. When I first joined in the summer of 2021, I was, on average, about 20 years younger than the next person and the only black person aside from a Puerto Rican man who lived quite far away and occasionally turned up to sessions. Many of the members didn’t speak to me all that much, and in all honesty, I didn’t speak to them. However, things changed when I started to sit in the coxswain seat. Slowly but surely, I got to know the names of people in my crews, then started to join for the post-session coffee on some mornings. I then realized that if I was a white person between the ages of 40 and 60, I wouldn't know where to start to develop a relationship with a black kid potentially decades younger than myself. Forming relationships across cultures and, for me, generations was a concerted effort from both sides to form something new. When I first joined, Allison Mueller, an accomplished former University of Iowa rower and local parent, offered to lend me her erg for the summer as she was off to go work at the Olympics in Tokyo. At first, I was a bit shocked at the kindness of this somewhat random white lady at my first club meeting at a chain restaurant. However, looking back, it was her kindness that helped give me the confidence to show up every day and the assurance that there were members of the club who wished for my success without even knowing me. It's okay to be the only one, in a sport like rowing, we have to get used to the idea if we want others to come after us. If we want rowing culture to be more open to black people, we, as black people, need to make an effort to insert ourselves into it.

Priorities & Time

For communities new to rowing, it’s important to demonstrate to parents the value rowing can bring to a child’s life. All sorts of studies prove that aerobic exercise helps people get better grades and sleep better. Rowing helps build disciplined, hard-working individuals. As mentioned in my article last year, Row New York’s junior program sees kids go to college at a way higher rate than the city at large, regardless of whether the athlete continued sports in college. At the end of the day, rowing is good for you and breeds success in whatever you choose to do. Our coaches and mentors need to make sure that the message is crystal clear to parents who are deciding if rowing is right for their son or daughter.

ACEs

Adverse Childhood Experiences can play a large role in the lives of black low-income Americans. ACEs include but are not limited to various forms of abuse, living with someone addicted to drugs or alcohol, with a mental illness, who was formerly incarcerated exposure to domestic violence, or parental separation. These things can deeply affect a child's ability to concentrate and perform well in school and may lead to problems with authority. Having our mentors and coaches equipped to deal with some of these effects in a kid’s life is important to retaining these types of kids. I will say that our coaches and mentors are not therapists and doctors. While they may play a pivotal role in helping children deal with their ACEs, it is not their job. They need to know how to meet a kid where they are. For many kids, being in an environment with physical activity and supportive peers and adults, such as that in rowing, will help them build belief in themselves to live the life they want to live, even if they don’t realize it.

 As you can see, there’s still a lot of work to be done. We’ve got kids in Trenton, New Jersey, racing on ergs, eager to be rowers. In Seattle, we’re learning what it takes to form a rowing program when the infrastructure is still in its infancy. The Pritchard Beach Water Activities Center is still an idea for Bill Pickard. It took him and community members four years just to get the park where it would be renovated. History is waiting to be made, we just have to go out and do it.  I believe that eight black boys and eight black girls from Trenton can win the Stotesbury Cup one day, just as much as I believe that one day Rainier Beach’s athletes will consider rowing just as much as basketball. It’s amazing what people can do when allowed to show the world what they’ve got.

I started rowing because I wanted to compete for something real. Loyola’s coach gave me and my walk-on guys the chance to be great and build a team. After four years, in the fall of 2023, Loyola’s Varsity Eight went to the Princeton Chase to show the nation’s best crews that we want to race. In the spring, we made school history by bringing two men’s eights to Dad Vail for the first time. This year, my former team will be sending a group of guys to IRAs for the first time in almost ten years. Now I sit writing this article from my flat in Nottingham, England, on a quest to compete against the best in the world with my new team at the Henley Royal Regatta. I row because every day, it's given me the opportunity to be a better man, friend, teammate, student, son, brother, and athlete. The sport has proven to me time and time again that I can be better than I was yesterday, even if I fall short of the man I want to be. I'm not special, I pull alright on the erg, I'm 5’9”, and my blade can never seem to get in the water quickly enough. I’m just a black kid from Jersey who has been able to take advantage of some amazing opportunities in life that have led me down a path few get to follow. The only other black American man I know of to row at the Henley Royal Regatta is Aquil Abdullah, and he won it. I hope as much as the next rower to win Henley, but also make history as the second Black American man to win it all. To my black people, just know that rowing won’t cheat you the way Uncle Sam has, and that it is truly those who show up and put in the work every day who will find success at whatever level they compete. It’s a long road to get to where we are going, but we have to keep reaching for more, and rowing will never deny you that.

Photo credit: Allmarkone