Modern High School and its Discontents

Sports Illustrated runs a recurring item entitled "This Week's Sign of the Apocalypse," highlighting something particularly absurd and ridiculous in sport.  I'll up the ante and offer the past two decades' sign of the apocalypse within the rowing world, and it is this: high school crew coaches telling their athletes with a straight face that they need to start specializing in rowing at the age of fourteen (or earlier).  This argument is so tremendously flawed that I don't really even know where to begin savaging it.  But since it's summer at Craftsbury and that means daily conversations with Pepa Miloucheva and Lisa Schlenker, let's just start there.  Pepa and I respectfully disagree about a lot of things pertaining to rowing and sculling, but here's something about which she is right on: rowing and sculling are among a small handful of sports that an athlete can never encounter prior to age 20, take up at age 23, and be world-class by age 30.  Try doing that as a nordic skier (forget about it).  Or a gymnast.  Or a swimmer.  While Pepa underestimates the subtleties of movement that rowers and scullers must master to be truly outstanding in their sport, she does not underestimate what it takes, neurologically, to master her own sport of nordic skiing or many others that require the athlete to manipulate his bodyweight in an unfamiliar gravitational environment.  While you might not have to specialize in swimming from age six forward, the door to world-class status is probably closed to you if you start learning to swim when you're 25.  For rowing and sculling, though, the door is still pretty much wide open.  Exhibit A is Lisa Schlenker.  She never picked up an oar until she was 26.  She's got two World Championship Silver medals in the ltwt single in her closet (or drawer or shoebox, or framed, I don't know which) and a trip to the Olympics in the ltwt 2X behind her.  Rowing may, in fact, be at the very top of the list of sports in which early specialization is not only unnecessary, but also potentially damaging to the long-term success of its participants.  So what such coaches are saying to you boils down to this: You should specialize in a sport that doesn't really require specialization, so that four years from now you can lose races to people who are better athletes than you because four years ago they were playing two other sports in addition to rowing.  Ask any collegiate coach at any level to tell you a story about a recruited athlete who rowed exclusively in high school and got steamrolled in the spring by stronger, fitter, more athletic walk-ons.  Most coaches I know have a dozen or more such stories.  This is not to knock participation in high school crew, but rather to discourage the crabbed outlook that assumes it guarantees anything or that multiple seasons of it is better than a single season for a multi-sport athlete.

So here's my message to high school coaches who are exerting subtle or not-so-subtle pressure on their athletes to stop playing other sports and focus exclusively on rowing: Stop it.  Stop it right now.

And the corollary message to parents of high school athletes and the athletes themselves: If your crew coach is telling you that you need to row ten or eleven months out of the year to the exclusion of participation in other sports, remind yourself to consider the source.  It may seem to be in your coach's best interest for you to train exclusively in rowing or sculling - he's got a trophy case to fill and a resume to build, after all, but hear this carefully and thoroughly: it won't make you a better human being, or even a better athlete, or even a better rower or sculler in the long run.  Here's a true statement: one of the most recurrent complaints that collegiate rowing coaches have about their rowers is lack of general, all-around athleticism.  And early specialization cannot teach that or provide an environment in which it is likely to develop.  I shudder to think what kind of athlete and sculler I would be if I had not participated in half a dozen other sports prior to finding rowing at age 20.  The truth is that I've learned valuable things that enrich my enjoyment of and proficiency in sculling from nearly every sport I've ever tried.  Further, if you ditch your other sports in order to devote yourself exclusively to crew, you miss out on one of the greatest opportunities of American adolescence.  Middle school and high school afford us the opportunity to participate in multiple team sports for a very short span of years, and almost none of us will ever get that opportunity again in any meaningful sense.  Quick - name an adult amateur soccer league that inspires commitment and devotion on a par with high school sports (trick question - there's not one).  We will become adults, embark on careers, perhaps get married and have children, and so on.  Playing pickup basketball can be tons of fun, but it will never match the experience of sharing a season, in uniform, with your peers.  And if you enjoy and are proficient at more than one sport, you should allow yourself the opportunity to play more than one sport, and the devil take anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.  

Here's the healthier alternative: commit yourself to being a fit, strong, athlete on a year-round basis.   Never allow yourself to get "out of shape."  If you enjoy more than one sport, go ahead and commit to participate in more than one sport.  And if you find at 16 or 17 that your real interest in your other sports or your aptitude for them is waning and you are inclined to devote more time and passion to crew, then do that.  And if your crew coach can't handle that, find another crew coach.

Full disclosure, complete with convenient rationalization: I coached high school crew for fifteen years, and more of my scullers were one-sport athletes than were multi-sport athletes,  but I was never comfortable with that and did my best to encourage people to be involved with a second sport (or third, in exceptional cases).  So if you're one of my former athletes or crew parents and are reading this and thinking "really?  Is this the same guy?" then I sincerely apologize for having failed to render this message as emphatically or to articulate it as precisely as I should have.

Res ipsa loquitur.  Avoid the coming apocalypse and its attendant craziness.