The ‘Cult’ of Crew

Published 9:00 pm Monday, June 4, 2007

EVERETT – If being a teenager is about having fun, then the kids in the Everett Rowing Association are something of an odd bunch.

After all, they spend upwards of 15 hours a week on the water, practicing in both fair and foul weather, and sometimes at an early weekend hour when their friends are still asleep.

They sacrifice not only their time but their bodies, with blisters, sore backs and aching fatigue among the common maladies.

Really, this is fun?

“My friends look at rowing almost as a cult,” said Alex Japhet of Edmonds, a senior at Kamiak High School. “The other day someone asked me, ‘Alex, is all you do is row and do homework?’ And I said ‘yes.’”

Friends, she said, “stop trying to call you and hang out because they know you’re busy.”

Evidently, a lot of people don’t get rowing.

But maybe they’ll get this. Excellence comes at a price, which these athletes pay in both their time and toil. And there are also rewards, with the biggest one coming this weekend when the Everett team heads off to the USRowing National Youth Championships at Harsha Lake outside of Cincinnati.

Now, rowing at nationals is no new thing for Everett. The team has taken multiple boats to Cincinnati for the past several years, but this year the association outdid itself, advancing all four eight-oared shells – the varsity and lightweight eights for both men and women – from the regional competition.

The women’s four with coxswain also qualified, giving Everett a total of 48 rowers (seven alternates) headed to Cincinnati.

“Going with that large a group is really something special,” said Matt Lacey, Everett’s racing director and head coach. “This year was absolutely tremendous in showing the kind of team we have.”

According to Lacey, 140 rowing clubs in the country qualified athletes for nationals. In that field, Everett and the host team from Cincinnati are tied for the most competitors.

“That we’re tied at the top is truly phenomenal,” Lacey said. The club’s prowess has increased in recent years, he added, “and this year it just finally came to fruition on the race course.”

The Pacific Northwest has long been a hotbed of rowing, of course. The University of Washington has one of the nation’s best collegiate programs, and several rowing clubs like Everett have helped generate interest in the sport among younger rowers.

The Everett club is headquartered in a boat house on the Snohomish River, near the I-5 overpass. Though mostly removed from the public eye, that stretch of water “is one of the best places to row in the Northwest,” said Lacey, a former UW rower. “We have uninterrupted miles of flat, row-able water, so that’s a huge asset for us.”

Also, a new dock, courtesy of funding help from the Everett Parks and Recreation Department.

This year’s Everett team has close to 100 rowers, with most coming from around Snohomish County. Some are athletes on school teams in the fall and winter, but many have dropped other sports to concentrate on rowing.

It is, several Everett rowers admit, a strange sport to love. Some reasons are obvious, like the grueling, day-after-day workouts and the lopsided ratio of practice time to race time.

“It’s like 99 percent practice,” said Matt White of Mukilteo, who rows on the men’s varsity eight. Added boatmate Chip Keyes of Arlington, “You do all that work for a six-minute race, and it’s over like that.”

Likewise, rowers rarely get the acclaim that comes from being a standout athlete in sports like, say, football or basketball.

“There’s no glory,” said Japhet, a member of the women’s varsity eight. Newcomers to rowing “either love it or drop it. Because if you don’t have a passion for it and if you’re not already a competitor, it’s not exactly fun.

“People that are looking for a leisure sport,” she added, “don’t usually stick with crew.”

Two traits common to most successful rowers, said Lacey, are commitment and passion. “If the work ethic is there and if the passion is there,” he said, “then those kids can take this as far as they want to.”

And most graduates of the Everett program do, in fact, take their rowing further. Many of the high school seniors in this year’s program will row in college, some with scholarships. Japhet, for instance, has a full ride to join the women’s crew team at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

Lacey has no idea how his boats will fare in Cincinnati, largely because he’s never seen rivals squads from the Midwest and East Coast. Race times are not much help either, since they can be skewed by variables such as wind and water conditions.

But however it turns out, Lacey wants this five-boat excursion to Cincinnati to be a stepping stone, not an aberration, for his program.

“We don’t want this to be a one-time thing,” he said. “We may have fewer kids (in total than some clubs in the country), but we’ve been able to do everything right to get to be as fast as we can be.”