TEN QUESTIONS WITH...

At your first meet at the Head of the Ohio this year, you helped UB to two first-place heat finishes. How important was it to get off to that kind of good start?
I think it was really important, especially for our lightweight crew. This is the first year we’ve had an actual lightweight program. We’ve had our own coach and we’ve been separated from the rest of the varsity program. It was really good to go out there and say to Rudy (Weiler), our coach, and the rest of the players on the team that we’re here and we’re going to be an important part of UB crew and, in the next couple years, we might be the most successful part of UB crew.

In the eight-person lightweight, you row in the seventh seat. What are some of the differences in responsibilities for rowers throughout the boat?
The eighth seat is the first person. They are the stroke. They set the tempo for the rest of the boat. Everyone else is watching them and your oar goes in when the stroke’s oar goes in and your oar goes out when the stroke’s oar goes out. You want to be swinging forward with them and moving with them at all times.

The seventh seat is similar in a lot of ways. They are the stroke for everyone on that side of the boat. So the seven-seat person has to have the same sense of tempo, the same sense of rhythm that the eight-seat does, but they also have to be someone who can follow.

Seats three through six are usually seen as the engine room. They are usually the strongest people in the boat, whose technique might not be as great, but they are strong. They are the powerhouse.

The bow pair are usually the smallest people in the boat. They are usually the technically most proficient people because it’s hard for them to get good clearance and technique because they are so far back.

In the four-person boat, how do those responsibilities change?
In a four-person, you basically have the stroke pair and the bow pair. You don’t really have the engine room, per se. I feel they are the four people that would row together the most cohesively.

As a junior, you’ve gone through the crew workouts here at Buffalo for two years. How challenging is it to wake up at 5 a.m. or earlier to have to get ready for practice?
After two years, it’s not challenging at all, honestly, as long as I go to bed on time. There’s always mornings when your alarm clock goes off and you think, ‘Why do I do this?’ But at the same time, I hardly ever feel like that anymore because I have so much fun practicing so I want to get up in the morning. I want to row. I like being around my coaches. I like being around my team.

What are some of the differences in the race styles between the fall and the spring seasons?
Races in the fall are longer. It varies a little bit, but they are usually about three to three and a half miles, so they take anywhere from 14 to 20 minutes, depending on the speed of the boat, the wind and the current. It’s started in a different style. Instead of starting straight across, they’ll start one at a time. One boat will start and then 15 seconds later, the next boat will start. For people watching, it’s really hard to tell who’s winning. It’s also really hard to tell if you’re winning if you’re in the race, because you can tell if you catch up to boats ahead of you that you’ve beaten them, but there can always be someone way in the back that can be doing just as well. You have to find it within yourself to push really hard.

At our race this weekend in the four, we won by half-a-second and there were no boats anywhere around us. There were like five boat lengths in front of us and five boat lengths behind us.

In the spring, the focus is much more on sprinting. The races are always 2,000 meters long, so they take anywhere from six minutes in a really good women’s eight to eight minutes in a four because there are less people. It’s just six boats in six lanes and it’s the first one to the finish line, just like a track race. There usually will be heats and semifinals and finals.

Rowing is a sport that is new to the NCAA, with Brown winning the first championship in 2002. What made so many colleges embrace a varsity rowing program?
One of the interesting things about rowing is that the reason that there are so many NCAA women’s crew teams is because of Title IX. The reason crew teams were started was that a team of 50 girls with a lot of boats offset the football team. There’s stories throughout the country of football teams in Arizona and Texas damming up a river so that they could have a crew team and be in compliance with Title IX. So it’s a lot easier for women’s crew to make the jump and actually men’s crew isn’t an NCAA sport.

This whole Title IX thing has hindered men’s teams becoming club teams because it’s the same thing, now there’s too many people and you aren’t in compliance anymore.

You need to have a lot of support from the school. It’s an expensive sport.

On last Sunday, you were quoted in an article in The Buffalo News on the changing role of girls and athletics. What is some advice you can give to younger girls who are starting to play sports?
The first thing to look at it is to make sure you’re doing it because you want to do it. Don’t focus on one sport and think I’m tall so I should play basketball or I’m short so I should be a gymnast. Especially when you’re younger, you should focus on having fun. If it feels like it’s work, then it’s not going to be something that you want to keep doing and you’re not going to get anything out of it. I think it’s important for girls to compete in sports. It gives them an outlet for their energy.

That same article said that you played tennis, softball and soccer in high school before you joined a local rowing club. What is it about crew that made you decide that it was the right sport for you?
I really liked playing soccer. I really liked playing softball. Tennis was ok, but crew is such a different sport. They say it’s the 'Ultimate Team Sport,' which is such a cliché, but it’s really true. You’re in a boat and it’s such a team sport but it’s also an individual sport because when you’re out there, you have to be the one that’s pushing yourself to row as hard as you can. If you’re not rowing as hard as you can, other people might not necessarily be able to tell, but you have to have the drive within yourself and the fitness to make sure you are pulling as hard as you can every stroke. At the same time, you have to coordinate all that energy with everyone else in the boat, because if everyone isn’t moving exactly together, then it’s not going to work and you’re not going to go anywhere.

It’s the only sport where you can walk onto a Division I program, never having played the sport before and end up being MVP. You can end up like our coaches, trying out for the national team and you never did it before college. If you haven’t played soccer since you were five, you don’t have the technique. You can always get better at crew. You can always get better at being stronger, at being quicker, at being fitter.

What was it like the first time you went out on the water and rowed?
The reason I really started rowing was because my mom’s best friend’s daughter rowed. So she thought it would be a good idea if I rowed and the first time I went out on the water, I was predisposed to hate it because Megan did it and I didn’t want to do it. But, once I was out there and I realized what it was like, I realized it was actually something I could grow to like. I remember thinking it was the most awkward thing ever and that I’d never be any good at it. It was the weirdest motion and everything they tell you doesn’t make any sense from what you think in your mind should be right.

What has been your favorite moment as a UB athlete?
I’ve had a lot of good moments and a lot of good wins and a lot of close races that were just as good, but my favorite moment was at last year’s home race. It was the first Nan Harvey Cup vs. Eastern Michigan. It was the first Athletes-for-Athletes event that we’ve ever really had because it was the only home race we’ve ever had. The weather was awful; it rained and poured, it was cold and disgusting. The races were delayed but having so many athletes show up, especially on a Sunday morning at eight and stand out…

When we were finishing the race, it was just us and Eastern Michigan and they were about a half a boat length ahead and we had maybe 250 meters left. All of a sudden, we got right near the finish where the bridge was and it sounded like there was a million people. All you could hear was this noise and we couldn’t even hear our coxswains for a little bit. You just knew that everyone was there and cheering for us. It was the most amazing feeling and I think we all reached down inside ourselves and thought, ‘We have to win. We can’t let this boat beat us in front of those people.’ We had maybe 20 strokes left and we walked through that whole half a boat length and beat that boat. It was the most amazing feeling.

“The 10 Questions With…” feature is compiled by Joe Guistina.