Hometown Friends Excel for Crimson Lightweights

One hundred ten mile bike rides and dinner at Poppi’s house—those are just a few of the things that varsity lightweight rowers Austin Meyer and Tom Nesel do together in their homestate of New York, where they live a mere 25 minutes apart.

Now the juniors race together on the first varsity eight for Harvard, but their connection goes much further back than workouts on the Charles.

Both coming from the Albany area, Nesel and Meyer raced together in a double for the Albany Rowing Center during the summers of their four years in high school.

In the summer before their senior year, they decided that they wanted to take the competition to the next level.

“Senior year, we started talking about trying to go to the Junior World Championships in the double,” Nesel said. “To do that, we had to row all of the school year as well.”

Nesel ended up joining Meyer’s high school crew team, even though he went to a different school, and became the only non-Shaker high school student to race for it. Because of the anomaly, Nesel was only allowed to race with Meyer in the double.

The pair ended up winning the US National Championships in 2008 and making the under-18 US team. At the World Championships in Linz, Austria, they placed 12th, the highest finish for an American team in that event. The result was especially impressive given that the two lightweights were competing in an openweight event.

Meyer and Nesel attribute much of their success to the dedication and guidance under Shaker coach Burt Apfelbaum.

Apfelbaum had fun with the rowers, referring to them as “Tweedledee” and “Tweedledum,” while also dubbing Meyer as “Captain America,” and Nesel as “Flipper,” due to his flip into the water after his ore stuck during a National Regatta practice row.

“He was super supportive,” Meyer said. “[He] helped us to get to Nationals and World Championships...He was almost a second father.”

Nesel also had a very close relationship with Apfelbaum.

“He lit a fire under my [seat] when I needed it,” Nesel added.

Nesel and Meyer still go to dinner at Apfelbaum’s house whenever they are home.

Off the water, the duo bonded over their love of bike riding.

The two would often drop everything and take their adventures off-road, much to the disapproval of Meyer’s mom.

“We used to skip school and ride our bikes around New York,” Meyers said. “But [we] could be doing worse things.”

Just like they do in the boat, the pair likes to push themselves to their cycling limits. One of their favorite routes was from Meyer’s home to Mount Greylock—the highest mountain in Massachusetts—a 110 mile roundtrip.

Once the time came to make a decision about venturing from home for college, the two held a firm belief that they needed to make separate decisions.

“We had all our official visits separately,” Nesel said. “We didn’t want to influence the other’s opinion.”

But in the end they both made the same but independent decision to come to Harvard. The duo since has excelled with the Crimson, taking the bronze medal together with the first varsity eight at last year’s IRA championships. In the team’s first race in the 2011, Nesel and Meyer helped Harvard’s 1V defeat Delaware by 11 seconds.

“We really want to win the IRAs, and if we can win the national title, [then] we go to English Henley—that’s a big deal,” Nesel says.

Both Nesel and Meyer have worked year round to ensure that their personal and team goals come to fruition. This past summer, Meyer rowed with the U23 national team and it garner a bronze medal in the World Championship, while Nesel trained in France with a former Olympic Champion.

The pair is modest when it comes to their future with crew beyond Harvard, but so far their accomplishments speak for themselves.

Their high school and college coaches summed up the boys’ collective contributions.

“They bring intensity, purpose, and a willingness to train,” said Harvard lightweight coach Charley Butt.

“You just don’t find too many kids willing to do the work they did,” Apfelbaum echoed. “They have become role models for other athletes in the Albany area.”