HEAD OF THE CHARLES '07: Return of the Queen

It is an October afternoon in the year 2000. A girl stands beside her father, gazing out over the water as the setting sun burns orange into the soft waves. There’s a sensory overload—the whoosh of oars slicing the smooth surface of the river combines with the smell of hot dog vendors, the sight of families stretched out on picnic blankets, and the faint buzz of cars rolling by on Memorial Drive.

Little does the girl, standing at water’s edge with her father on that October afternoon, know that in a few years she will be captain of a team that has been to the NCAA Championships 10 times, scraping the top of that very river, fighting her way down the sinuous Head of the Charles race course.

Co-captain Laura Larsen-Strecker grew up not far from this Cambridge scene, in adjacent Brookline. She began rowing in her freshman year of high school, after her father took her to watch the Head of the Charles Regatta, and she went out on those sacred waters a few months later. Larsen-Strecker rowed throughout high school, participating in the Head of the Charles as a junior and senior and deciding in her final year to continue her rowing career at Harvard.

In her freshman season, she rowed for the Black and White varsity heavyweights during the 40th edition of the Head of the Charles. Despite a bout of strep throat just days before the marquee fall regatta in her sophomore season, Larsen-Strecker hit the Charles again but felt her performance suffered. An injury left her sitting out the weekend in her junior year, so this final year on her home course is a special one.

And this year is all the more significant for Larsen-Strecker because she is one of just a few seniors racing for the Radcliffe heavyweight varsity.

In previous years, senior leadership spurred Radcliffe during the spring racing season, but this year, a young squad gives the Black and White varsity a different look. Two juniors—commodore Sarah Moore and co-captain Liz Demers—round out the formal leadership positions for the team.

Despite there being fewer seniors, their influence remains strong, and Larsen-Strecker paces them at the front.

“It’s not the three of us leading the team solely,” Demers says. “It is the senior group as a whole—it is their team. We just have the titles.”

Having spent the majority of her rowing career on the Charles and participated in the Head of the Charles for five of the past six years, Laursen-Strecker recalls the shift from high school to collegiate crew, recognizing it as a contrast in terms of training and technical focus on the water.

“In high school, [the Head of the Charles] was the culmination of all the training prior to the race,” Larsen-Strecker says. “Fall season would start two weeks into August, four weeks earlier than here, [and] Head of the Charles would be the highlight of the fall. Everything was less exciting.”

As opposed to high school rowing, the regatta is a celebratory and light-hearted one at the college level, since it occurs just a few weeks after the start of fall training.

“We are not quite as technically exact, the details are just starting to come together,” Larsen-Strecker explained.

Because of its early date in the season, the Head of the Charles is not a proper indicator of the spring season to come, as more practice and more races yield quite a different squad after a long cold winter of training inside. What also brings about a gradual refinement of the team dynamic is the annual graduation of a senior class and the influx of a new freshman class. These changes have profound effects on a team in a sport with such a communal nature, as boats change annually with the departure of some oarswomen and the arrival of others. Lineups for the Head of the Charles are not finalized

until the last days of the week before the Regatta, as sophomores get used to the varsity program.

Nonetheless, the team feels confident heading into this first fall test. Larsen-Strecker and Demers have the team ready to succeed.

“Laura is extremely wise on the river, she has great boat feel and great knowledge of the stroke,” Demers said. “It’s hard to train really hard consistently, but she does it.”

This final year marks the culmination of Laura’s career, a seven-year journey across the river that winds through Boston, with the Head of the Charles as a positive kick-start for the team she co-captains.

“The one race I really latched onto was the Head of the Charles. Just the whole feeling around the weekend with all the people watching and all the boats on the water,” Larsen-Strecker said. “Rowing is a relatively anonymous sport and it is nice to have other people notice that you are around.”

Larsen-Strecker is excited to fill her new role as leader, so much so, that perhaps this is not the final year we will see her traversing the bridge early in the morning, making her way to the boathouse, or gliding her paddle across the river that dominated her teenage years. Masters crew lingers as an opportunity to continue doing what she loves.

“Rowing is such a part of my life and who I am that it is hard to imagine that after this year I will not be rowing in the same capacity as I am now.” Larsen-Strecker said. “The dynamic of being on a team and all the time we put in, training with my teammates—I can’t imagine ever giving that up.”