Keynote for New Hampton School

A very long time ago when I was sitting where you’re sitting now, I had no idea where I was heading with my life besides going to college. The acceptable way to think at the time was to look ahead, move out of your old self into some new self, like a snake shedding its skin. Then I went to college, dropped field hockey and basketball to get into a 60-foot-long piece of fiberglass less than 21/2 feet in width at the widest point, sitting backwards, using every muscle and brain cell in my body to drive this rowing shell towards something I couldn’t even see. I’ve been happy ever since. So, what I want to explore with you is the possibility that this milestone called graduation is one of many markers in your life to steer your boat off of. And that knowing where you’ve been allows you to see where your path is headed.

The only way I know how to verbalize this idea is through rowing. In rowing there are four parts to the stroke: the catch, drive, release or finish, and recovery. The catch is where the oar enters the water. The drive is where every ounce of your being, mental and physical, connect to the resistance of the water, the weight of the boat, and the 2000 pounds of yours and your teammates’ body weight. The release is where you take the oar out of the water. The recovery is your time to prepare for the next drive cycle. You are in the recovery phase.

A life example of the catch is when I first chose the direction of national and Olympic level rowing. Competing at an Olympic level was no longer an idea—like the oar waiting above the water is not the “catch” until it is in the water. I found out what I’d have to do to enter the process, and entered.

Kris Korzeniowski—Coach who changed the course of my life
What I eventually found out was that I had to go to Boston to go through an on land testing process that would screen out those who really had no “talent”. After a long 2-hour drive in my coach’s maroon Rambler, minus the rear windows, in the bitter winter cold, we arrived at the Harvard women’s Boathouse in Cambridge, Mass. The building echoed with the crash of weights, the cries of exertion coming from women testing to absolute failure on stationary bikes. I climbed the stone stairs and came face to face with Kris Korzienowski. My coach and I approached him. “Yes, you want to test. Who are you,” Korzienowski asked? I told him my name. “What school?” I told him Mount Holyoke College. “How tall?” I told him 5 foot 8 inches. “How much do you weigh?” I told him 175 pounds. He shook his head and said, “No, you will not test,” and turned away. It turned out he didn’t want to even look at any athletes unless they were coming from a known, competitive program, and were at least 5’10. Korzienowski was looking for a product, a look, a sign of some sort that showed I had evolved already as an Olympic athlete. He made me turn around and look ahead to what he was looking at, and in doing so I momentarily lost my path, my oar still hanging above the water. I eventually turned back to my path, trusting my driving desire to build my mind and body around rowing.
I made my first national team 2 years later. And we walked away from the Munich Worlds with a bronze medal.

The Drive
An example of the drive in my life, where every ounce of your mental and physical being are exerted to move the boat, took place when I was the national team coach. My team was competing in the world championships in Tasmania, and in the first couple of days there learned that the Romanian team had no equipment. Their boathouse had been destroyed during the revolution in their country, and the men’s and women’s teams had spent the summer in the safety and care of various European countries. I remember seeing the women filing off their bus, eyes cast down, silent. My team and I met later with our team manager to discuss loaning the women one of our boats. The decision was unanimous—yes. Without the Romanians—clearly the fastest in the world the past couple of years—the field would be incomplete. The finals came: the Romanian and American women’s teams would face each other. The Romanians took the Gold and we took the silver. The drive is about striving with yourself, your teammates and the competition. The Romanians challenged us to rise to a more complex level of competition, one that recognized where we were both coming from, and choosing to head in the same direction side by side, on a level playing field pushing each other stroke by stroke.

The Release
Here I was a national team coach, with a silver medal performance in my first year, heading down the path that everyone seemed to think I belonged on, including myself, yet I was miserable. I was turned around looking ahead in the direction that everyone else was looking in, namely the finish line and who had won and who had lost. I fell out of love with the process, and became focused on the outcome solely, and afraid of failing.
The release in rowing is the moment that the oar lets go of the water, ideally without disturbing the forward momentum of the boat, while quietly pulling your body weight in the opposite direction, coiling up to drive the boat again. I liken my coaching at the national team level to staying in the water too long—I was fighting to apply my strength in a way that was ineffective. I did not discover how gifted a coach I was until I left Elite level rowing. I released myself from my forward looking position, and turned back sternward to remember where I had come from.

The Recovery
Turning back allowed me to connect with a commitment I had made to myself when I was 16, which was to help people reach the core of who they are. I came to understand what this meant to me in my late 20’s—give back to people some of the strength I had gained thanks to the support of others. I spent four years on the road talking to high school students across the country about racism, gender bias—difference of all kinds—using personal stories and the metaphor of sports to frame the stories. The looking back in my life at the experiences that had guided me to my present path led me to go back to school to get my masters in education at Harvard and to create a non-profit called Row As One Institute which offers rowing programs to men and women in their 30’s and up, G-ROW Boston—a competitive rowing program for racially diverse girls in the Boston Public Schools, and WeCanRow—a wellness and recovery program for breast cancer survivors looking to re-build their inner and physical strength.

I look at all of you now and I imagine the uniqueness of each of your stories that have brought you to this moment. Now may be a time when some of you just don’t have the words to say who you are, where you’re headed, what your passion is. You don’t have to. Those moments when we stand face to face with another human being , when we can no longer see one another through our words, are the moments when we must turn inwardly. The new communication will come with time. Silence is a language, a beautiful language feared by many of us because it leaves us feeling adrift.

Get in your boat. Start at the release, with your oars in the water, just balancing the boat. When you’re ready, take the oars out, move slowly on the recovery, looking out over your past, and catch, locking your heart and soul around that which speaks the truth to you, and lever your whole being against that one grain of truth, not knowing where you’ll end up. Know you will belong, because you have chosen the path.

Congratulations to you all. I’m honored to be a part of your celebration.