Either Oar

If I have this right, today sports fans across the nation are following "National Signing Day." With the antics of the National Football League finally winding down and reports of recruitment and NCAA violations rising at most big colleges, maybe most of you aren't the least bit interested in the day's follies. But here's another tag: it's National Girls and Women in Sports Day and there is lots to cheer about.

My daughter is a Division 1, non-scholarship athlete for the University of Minnesota rowing team. Like 90% of the women on her crew team, and others like it across the Midwest, she is a walk-on, completely new to the sport.


After 6 years of playing three sports and earning 11 varsity letters, she thought she was done with organized athletics. She was tired of it all. But sports empowered her to find rhythm and motion in her body, to lean into and push back on expectations to look good, be nice, and blend in. It's a big part of who she is.

So when the assistant coach for the Gopher rowing team sent a letter inviting her to try out for the novice team, she decided "yes" just a week before school.

The workouts are hard. The team fought six years for a boathouse and it finally partially opened this January, after seasons making do with some rental party tents down by the St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam. The women athletes had to walk or ride their bikes through the mazes of boilerhouses and railroad tracks behind the university to get there and then haul their 60-foot-long boats out from under the canvases each day to a makeshift dock.

Many novice rowers have quit. After Christmas break, seven more rowers quit after the practices became even tougher and more frequent, including two-a-days. My daughter said that some rowers would throw up or cry while on the "ergs," or rowing machines, pulling at 100% and 90% and on and on for long, grueling stretches. She thought she would prefer throwing up to crying.

She knows her maximum pulls on the machines right now; she knows when her mind starts to doubt and how to bring it back into focus for the duration. She told me, "I love this sport. I love competing without all that anger [of youth court sports]. I love the discipline. I love the sound we make together on the water."

Before the boathouse opened, the rowers had to work their way up to Mariucci Arena to share weightlifting time with the various men's "revenue sports" athletes. She knows a few of them and shares stories of juggling sports and school and girlfriend/boyfriend relationships. Others, though, saunter in the weight room with the look of entitlement and yell out, "What are you girls still doing here?"

Over the weekend, a yahoo we happened to sit with met my daughter for the first time. When she told him she was on the rowing team, he said (I could have smacked him. I should have smacked him.): "You'll have to thank the football team for buying you those boats."

Meanwhile, the women's rowing team with the collective 3.0+ GPA shares 23 scholarships among the 30 varsity athletes, an egalitarian co-op. The parents of the athletes send e-mails before head races and regattas for donations of food and napkins and paper plates.

If all goes well, my daughter will be racing in a Novice 8-boat this spring. Her coach told her, "Of course, we wish you were 6 inches taller, but you have a lot of engine inside that body."


(she is second row, five from left)

It's ice cold and snowy out now and the waterways are frozen over, but if you think of it, mark your calendars for April 14 or April 21, 10 a.m., at Lake Phalen on St. Paul's East Side for races against Iowa, Wisconsin, and Kansas.

As they say, have a good day. Throw like a girl--or a boy, your choice--and be a sport.