O'Leary Leads Lightweight Crew

The path to becoming a rower is different for every person. Rowing is Harvard’s oldest sport but it is not widely practiced in high schools and requires significant dedication from a young age, so for the budding athlete it may not always be the obvious choice.

But for lightweight co-captain Matt O’Leary, rowing has always been a part of his life.

His mother, Liz O’Leary, is the current women’s heavyweight coach at Harvard and has been coaching rowing since before Matt was born. The Westwood, Mass., native has been running around the Harvard boathouse since he was two years old.

“You can’t grow up not knowing about the sport if you grow up in the boathouse,” Matt said. “I started rowing in seventh grade.”

Liz had a distinguished career as a rower, competing for the U.S. national team at the Olympic Games in 1976 and 1980, and then coaching the team itself in 1988.

Perhaps surprisingly then, both mother and son agree it was not his familial ties to rowing which led him to where he is today.

“I never thought [it was inevitable],” Matt said. “I always wanted to be a hockey player.”

Liz too recalled Matt trying a number of sports. As a kid he played baseball, soccer, and hockey at various times, and even had his dad coach him in lacrosse.

“He certainly knew he wanted to play something,” Liz said. “He was a hockey goalie. That was his primary sport when he was younger.”

While Matt cannot remember what drew him to rowing in the first place, his mother offered up one explanation.

“The thing about Matt is [that] he likes to do things just a little bit differently,” Liz said. “If he’s on the hockey team, he wants to be the goalie, and of all the sports you could choose for a spring sport, [he thought], ‘what would be the most off the beaten track?’ That will be [rowing] in most high school environments, [so] that’s what he did…. I don’t think it had much to do with me.”

Whatever his reasons for starting out, as he moved through high school, Matt was still competing in a number of sports as a talented athlete, with crew simply comprising the spring portion of his athletic year.

As in the case of many athletes, though, it was the arrival of a coach which changed Matt’s path permanently.

“[High school crew coach Gavin Grant] is the reason I’m here,” Matt said. “If he hadn’t showed up, we would have stayed as a pretty average team, and I probably wouldn’t have kept rowing in college. But he showed us how to train hard, how to win races. That pretty much transformed what I wanted to do in college and afterwards."

Grant came to Noble and Greenough School as a coach at the beginning of Matt’s junior year and rapidly created a culture of success.

In his senior year, Matt rowed as part of the varsity four that won the national championship in 2009. It was a remarkable turnaround for a team which Matt himself described as fairly average up to that point.

“Between Matt and a couple of the other guys on the team, there was some great leadership and great potential there,” Grant said. “A number of the guys that were in that boat went to row in college at quite successful programs so I think there was a lot of potential in the group. Once the leadership showed, it helped them get their speed [and] get some of that competitive instinct that maybe they didn’t have as underclassmen.”

Grant did not shape Matt into a rower, but rather revealed a talent which had been there all along.

Matt cited two reasons for why he will be training with the USRowing team in Oklahoma City this summer rather than trying to get drafted in the NHL as he originally dreamed. He improved much more at crew than he ever did at hockey, and the sport of rowing rewards the skill Matt has most in abundance—diligence.

“I think the most rewarding part about [rowing] is that how good you end up being is directly correlated to how hard you work,” Matt said. “If you want to put in the time to go fast, you can do it. I know you can’t be successful if you don’t have the drive to push yourself beyond where you are comfortable. That’s how everyone on the team here ends up here.”

Matt acknowledges that practice improves one’s hockey performance as well, but not to the same degree as with rowing. There was always an element of chance involved, which was on some level frustrating for the extremely disciplined Matt.

“[Matt] is a pretty determined individual and he has worked hard to be where he is,” Liz said. “He’s put in the time and the focus that you need to do what he has done, or rather, what he is doing.”

Matt’s discipline and commitment to hard work has certainly reaped benefits in his career thus far.

Through four years of collegiate rowing, O’Leary’s boats have never lost a single dual meet.

Standing as co-captain on the No.1 ranked boat in the nation, he will be heading to EARC Sprints and then most likely to the IRA National Championships for one last time in the coming weeks.

While the Crimson record books will note down the four years of remarkable accomplishments of his senior class, the reason behind Matt’s success will be left out.

There is no box score, just as there is no replacement for strong commitment.

“You never have to wonder if O’Leary is pulling his weight,” sophomore lightweight rower Rob Hawthorne said. “He’s often the first person in the boathouse in the morning and one of the last ones to leave. He invests a lot of time and energy making sure he’s getting faster and he expects the same of everyone else.”