PLAYER PROFILE: Griffen Schroeder '05, Men's Lightweight Crew

This story starts in the backyard, in the driveway, and in the swimming pool—in every place two brothers compete for athletic superiority.

It starts there and ends up all over the place: in Palo Alto, in Cambridge, in Athens, and in Camden, N.J. At issue is how it got to Cambridge—to Newell Boathouse. In the aisles of Harvard’s rowing palace, that is where this story begins again.

It is a place varsity lightweight three-seat Griffin Schroeder might call home, at least during the spring. And it is a place he might never have gone were it not for his older brother, Jamie, a senior in Stanford’s varsity eight.

When Griffin suffered an ankle injury that kept him out of his last high school track season, Jamie—then a standout freshman at Stanford—suggested rowing.

“[Jamie] had made the Under-23 National Team,” Griffin recalls, “and he told me, ‘Switch to crew, it’s much more fun.’”

The younger Schroeder followed his brother’s advice, spending his first year in the second freshman lightweight eight at Harvard. He was new to the sport, competing against recruits who had been rowing for years.

What was it about crew—about enduring frozen Cambridge winters and exhausting erg tests and nerve-racking seat races—that kept him tying into his foot stretchers as a freshman?

“It’s a personal thing between me and my brother,” Griffin says, laughing. “That’s what crew has been to me.”

His older brother, meanwhile, has been a fixture in the Cardinal varsity boat. Both came to college as novices, but the 6’8, 225-pound Jamie possessed the archetypal crew body that Griffin—a bona fide lightweight at 6’2, 155—didn’t have.

“He has legs the size of my torso,” Griffin says. “I didn’t have that shock and awe advantage right off the line, but I trusted that I had whatever genetic advantage it is that he has.”

The elder, bigger Schroeder flew to Boston for the CRASH-B indoor rowing championships in February 2002, completely anonymous to the rowing community. Griffin shared a boathouse with an incredible Harvard heavyweight crew and fully expected his brother to get routed.

“As a freshman, I said, ‘The guys here are amazing, Jamie. You’re going to get beat bad,’” Griffin remembers. “And he comes out to CRASH-Bs and wins the whole thing.”

Griffin, who dominated the sibling athletic rivalry throughout their childhood, watched as his brother transformed into an international phenom. He watched, first as a member of the second freshman boat, then the third varsity boat, and eventually the second varsity boat as a junior.

Each year, Griffin moved up the Newell hierarchy. And all the while, Jamie piled up recognition from USRowing.

The younger Schroeder was left to contend with a stacked group of Harvard lightweight recruits, and despite his talent on the erg, his technique was lacking.

So as Jamie dismantled the collegiate field and was named to the Olympic four headed to Athens, Griffin bought into coach Charley Butt’s advice about technique. He had the genes, he had the erg scores, and he had the competitive spirit with his brother keeping him going—all he had to do was put Butt’s advice to work.

“He really dedicated himself to making the varsity,” teammate Dave Stephens says. “The odds are stacked against you if you’re not a recruit, but he worked on his technique and got really good.”

As a senior, Griffin made the varsity lightweight eight and is just one of two non-recruits on the country’s No. 1 boat.

“That’s absolutely fantastic,” his brother Jamie says. “I couldn’t be more proud of him.”

Whereas Jamie’s Stanford boat is No. 5 in the national heavyweight polls and placed third at the Pac 10 Championships, the Harvard lightweights headed to IRAs in Camden, N.J. as the Eastern Sprints champions and the country’s No. 1 lightweight crew.

And Griffin isn’t buying the heavyweight-lightweight distinction. Perhaps it is just long-standing arrogance as the childhood champion of a sibling rivalry, but Griffin remains confident his boat could outduel the Cardinal.

“Our time [5:49.0 on April 30] beat the heavyweight number six, Northeastern,” Griffin says. “And Stanford is fifth, so that puts us—according to my fantasy calculations—right up there with them.”

Jamie, true to the sibling rivalry, disagrees.

“I think it’s pretty unlikely,” he says. “Heavyweight boats are a lot faster.”

Their on-the-water battle—unlike one-on-one basketball games or swimming races—will remain theoretical for the Schroeder brothers. At Camden, Griffin’s eight rowed in the lightweight championship final, Jamie’s in the heavyweight petite final. The former finished fourth, while the latter took first place in his race, earning a seventh place finish overall at nationals.

It was a family reunion of sorts, a culmination of 21 years of competition, all boiling down to two 2,000 meter races and endless hypotheses as to whose boat was really the better one.

But Griffin, armed with an Eastern Sprints title, need not worry that his reign as sibling rivalry champion is all together over.

­—Staff writer Aidan E. Tait can be reached at atait@fas.harvard.edu.