HEAD OF THE CHARLES '06: Walking the Walk

Harvard crew offers a unique opportunity for incoming freshmen with no rowing experience: Newell Boathouse is home to 23 heavyweight and lightweight varsity national championships, and Harvard coaches know the value of walk-ons to the success of the varsity and freshmen programs.

Only five to 10 recruits help round out the heavyweight and lightweight freshman rosters each season, giving the Crimson just one boat comprised of recruited athletes. As many as three freshman eights compete in racing season—each team needs a minimum of 30 oarsmen and several coxswains—and both the heavyweight and lightweight programs depend on a steady stream of walk-ons.

Freshman lightweight coach Linda Muri typifies the effort coaches put into finding walk-ons.

“I went through all the athletic preference cards to find students at the lightweight and coxswain sizes,” Muri says. “Then I spent a few nights at home watching movies while I wrote 170 handwritten letters them.”

Such effort is especially crucial to the success of the lightweight program, which requires that oarsmen remain under 160 pounds during the spring season.

In September, Muri spent a day outside Annenberg handing out flyers to freshmen, and coaches and varsity oarsmen dropped off flyers in student’s door boxes.

As a result of Muri’s efforts, 93 potential lightweight oarsmen showed up at the organizational meeting.

But from that point on, keeping walk-ons on the team is a battle against attrition.

By the first practice, the number of lightweight walk-ons was down to 80.

Junior lightweight Dunbar Carpenter—who began rowing as a freshman and was on the second varsity eight last year—remembers his thought process in joining the team.

“I’d been pretty athletic my whole life. I ran cross-country in high school, but I doubted I could make the varsity team,” Carpenter says. “I thought I should give crew a shot. I started going to practices and that was it.”

Sophomore heavyweight Matt Webb joined the team after playing varsity football and lacrosse in high school. Originally recruited to play football at Yale, Webb came to Harvard and decided to give crew a shot.

His story is common, as many former high school athletes see rowing as a way to continue playing a sport while trying something both completely different and extremely well known within and outside Harvard.

“People have asked me why I didn’t just try to walk-on to football,” Webb says. “Harvard’s football team is the best in the Ivies, but people all around the world associate Harvard and rowing.”

The draw of prestige is an incontrovertible one: Harvard’s crew programs boast dozens more Ivy and national championships than any other sport. Former Harvard varsities have competed in the Olympics, and both varsity programs make routine trips to the Henley Royal Regatta.

There is a strange inevitability to winning in Newell Boathouse—one that is an excellent recruiting tool for athletes looking for something new to try.

The allure pulls them in, but the grueling season and the expectations make it hard to keep up.

A month into the fall season, only 56 lightweight freshmen still attend practice.

Initially, inexperienced walk-ons get limited exposure to the water in the fall. Instead, they spend the fall improving their conditioning. Practices are spent on the ergs in Newell or running—often up and down every section of Harvard Stadium.

Freshman recruits spend the practices before the Head of the Charles rowing with the varsity, while the walk-ons condition and begin rowing on the water under the supervision of a freshman coach.

There’s also the daunting winter triathlon—a 7500-meter row on the erg, a 4.2 mile run, and a complete run through Harvard stadium—that is on schedule months before the walk-ons will ever see the fruits of their labor in spring competition.

But for some, the conditioning and the constant improvement are incentive enough.

“By November, December, I had started feeling really good about crew,” Carpenter says. “We’d been working out for a while and I’d started seeing some really drastic improvements in my own performance.”

The team’s true racing season, however, does not begin until April. Muri expects that no more than 30 freshmen will remain with the team by the spring.

And with spring comes the weekly weigh-in for lightweights, an added element that makes dedication all the more necessary.

“Crew makes me very much more aware of my weight and what I eat. Basically, I eat normally five days a week,” he says. “Then on Thursdays, I tend to eat light. Fridays, I don’t drink anything until weigh-ins at night and eat only light snacks.”

But the months of training usually pay off for the most dedicated walk-ons. Anton Wintner, a junior heavyweight, raced with the second varsity last year, and only an early season injury prevented him from racing in the varsity eight.

“I enjoy crew, I enjoy the competition, I enjoy the guys on the team,” Wintner says. “I can’t imagine my life without sports.”

In each of the past two seasons, the varsity lightweight boat has included two walk-ons. Two walk-ons were on the second varsity eight last year as well.

By the time freshman year ends, the best walk-ons have become largely indistinguishable from recruited rowers. Usually only 12 to 15 oarsmen–recruits and former walk-ons–return for the sophomore-year campaign.

“It’s really the people who have rowed before who choose to stick with it,” Muri says. “Those who rowed before they came here just keep on rowing.”

After two seasons, Carpenter has chosen to take this fall off to decide whether or not to return to rowing in the spring.

“It’s a sport where you sacrifice a lot to get a lot out of it,” Carpenter says. “It’s a big time commitment.”

Webb, however, is back at Newell Boathouse this fall, already in training for his first season with the varsity.

“Every day, I need to earn my spot on this team, and if I once were to feel comfortable with my status here, I’d have lost the drive that got me this far,” he says. “It’s an odd dynamic to have such defined competition between your own teammates. I feel people think that competition is a negative without realizing that we’re all working together, pushing one another to become better rowers.”