Share with me your child’s experience rowing crew

[Anonymous]

Like all sports, your child’s experience will vary not just based on the coach but the particular group of kids on the team. Unlike most other sports - there is a significant amount of time spent together - bus to and from practice 5 days a week in addition to practices and all day regattas. For my kid he loved the sport, not the people.

[Anonymous]

My daughter graduated this year from a FCPS school. She rowed three years and did two seasons of club rowing. She didn’t get recruited bc she was injured much of her junior hs season. However, she just walked on to a D1 team and is loving it. She was a swimmer prior and Ithink is more team and endurance oriented. She loved swim practice, but not the meets. She loves being on a team. It’s been amazing for her. We are lucky bc her HS team was closer to the boathouse than any of the other teams. It is a huge time commitment.

[Anonymous]

My son rows with one of the few MCPS teams- they’re not officially MCPS, but club teams largely made up of students from the school.

He is a swimmer, long and lean, amazing lung capacity, but I wouldn’t say a particularly great “team” player, and he loves crew. He likes the boats and the rigging and being out on the water. He doesn’t love erg-ing on practice days off the water, but he does it. We have been surprised how much he enjoys it!

Practice is 5 times a week, once on land. It’s a lot of coordinating carpools etc, but no different from any other club sport. Regattas are in VA and DE and PA. No air travel.

He says he doesn’t want to row in college- it’s just for fun now.

It’s a neat sport that I wasn’t aware of as a Midwesterner!

[Anonymous]

Rowing is an amazing sport, but it’s also one of the biggest time commitments a student can take on. The real frustration begins when all that training doesn’t lead to progress. The truth is, the erg score is the SAT of rowing — college coaches care about it far more than most clubs admit. When juniors hit plateaus, it’s usually because they haven’t learned how to connect efficient rowing on the erg with speed on the water. That’s where an elite online rowing coach can make all the difference — guiding progress, preventing burnout, and reigniting motivation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The time commitment is major: practice four days a week and regattas all day Saturday during the season, and because you have to get to the boathouse there is more transit time than most high school sports, depending on where you live. Lots of cleaning and hauling boats. It helps to be very tall. You have to be the kind of person who enjoys/thrives at doing repetitive actions while facing someone else’s back. My dh and one kid have the right build and mind for it and love it; my other kid and I find erging boring and painful—we are runners and it’s a different mentality, I think. Can’t really articulate beyond that.

Be aware that for girls there are genuine recruiting opportunities for college. Lots of girls from our school go into college rowing. For boys, it’s d3 only but I know only one boy who rows in college and it might be club rowing,

Everyone - especially rowers - find erging boring and painful. Rowing and erging are different, rowing is where the love is.

OP, middle or high school are good times to get kids interested in rowing. Summer can be a good time to try it out since clubs often have camps, or novice summer leagues. It's a great sport, is especially good at teaching teamwork since there is no "star" of the team in the way that you think of the QB as the star of the football team. I rowed in high school but not college, and I've rowed off and on as an adult too. Highly recommend.

That is not true.

Indoor erg competitions are already popular and they grow bigger every year.