I want to personally thank Lauren Sawyer, Sheila Sawyer’s mother, for setting up and preparing the topics of discussion at this past Monday’s college recruiting panel. Hopefully, all who were able to attend had some of the questions answered.
The athletes and their colleges/universities:
Lauren Sawyer – Princeton University
Liam Davidson – Dartmouth College
Naomi Ford – Radcliffe (Harvard University)
Jaclyn Riedel – Indiana University (Shrewsbury HS Crew graduate, 2008)
Mike Kean – father of Caitlin Kean & daughters who have already gone through the college recruiting process
Some of the major discussion points:
1. Choose the college, first, that happens to have a crew team rather than the crew team that happens to have a college around it. There is so much more to college than athletics, and you may find yourself, through injury perhaps, not rowing, and you still have years of study to complete.
1. Choose the college, first, that happens to have a crew team rather than the crew team that happens to have a college around it. There is so much more to college than athletics, and you may find yourself, through injury perhaps, not rowing, and you still have years of study to complete.
2. Be proactive and don’t wait around for coaches to contact you. Each major college will have, through the individual college’s crew website, an athlete questionnaire to complete. This is typically your first line of communication to the coaches.
3. Women’s collegiate crew is an NCAA-sanctioned sport. There are very strict rules that colleges/universities have to follow regarding recruiting. You want to visit the NCAA Eligibility Center website at https://web3.ncaa.org/ecwr3/ for more information.
4. The present/former athletes that spoke on Monday are/were all Division 1 athletes. The practice/race schedule that they spoke about is for D1. In case there was some concern about the amount of time needed to row for D1, there are very competitive, very fine, D2 & D3 crew teams out there that may not be as time-consuming as D1. As a brief list (and, this is only from the Northeast/New England region), some D2/D3 crew teams are: Trinity College, US Coast Guard Academy, Wesleyan U., Assumption College, Tufts U., Williams U., WPI, Bates College, Ithaca College.
5. The rowing community is a unique community. When people find out that you have rowed, the conversation typically shifts to talking about how challenging the sport is and what you have gone through during your training. It is a sport that will give back more than you realize. Of course, you need to love the sport and commit to it to get that return.
The panel discussion, in its entirety, from Monday was recorded and I’ve posted it on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/
Again, thank you to Lauren Sawyer for spearheading this very informative evening. Please reach out to me if you have any other questions or follow up.
Take care
Matt
