Michigan Rowing--First school sponsored Sport EVER (for a Kennedy)???

Yep, it's true. I am officially a Wolverine Athlete! Granted, I'm not quite as famous as Denard Robinson or Bo Schembechler, but I'm still one of them!

Rowing was quite the random sport, I'll admit. Daddy was always pushing us as little kids to go out for soccer, basketball, baseball - well it was T-Ball then but it counted(: The problem was, it never really clicked with me or Ethan. I even distinctly remember in baseball (the balls were being pitched now by kids) when I would purposely never swing because I figured the kid pitchers would pitch more balls than strikes. I only liked the adrenaline rush of running from base to base, and then again, that wasn't much fun either.

So it was sort of destiny when one of my leaders at Orientation told me the Rowing team would try and recruit me. Why? Cause they like tall people(: Three weeks later, a postcard came in the mail, giving me times for Open Boathouses and Mass Meetings and let me tell you, that Open Boathouse I went to, like this entire experience, sure was an interesting thing for me. Having never tried out for any sports team, I went in a blank slate and came out knowing that all the myths about tryouts are true. It's all about perception. To me it seemed, none of the guys were very friendly. They all seemed to have bulging muscles popping out of their Under Armour tech shirts or side-less tanks. All their T-Shirts either bore the name of a popular sports team, sports brand or a high school sports team they were on, and all seemed to completely know what their doing while I tried to work the basic technique out. It was KINDA scary.

The thing though that made me keep going to practices is that with the exception of four guys out of 100, no one who tried out for the team had ever rowed before. It is very unlike football or basketball where everybody knows exactly what they're doing; here, it's an open field of opportunity BABY!

So those first two and a half weeks before the tryout were spent on erg's (an indoor rowing machine), in the barge (an unflippable, detested fat boat used for the NEWBS(: ) and near the end of training, out on the racing shells. Every day, we had one hour practices, and it varied from just straight workouts to doing small drills, with a HUGE emphasis on just getting the technique. And then came............THE TRYOUT! Again, this was completely new territory as I had never tried out for any sports team. SO what'd I do? Just what I do before my horn auditions of course! This involved listening to some hip-hop music and just going through all the Rocky movies (ok so the latter I don't do for auditions, but they helped in this instance(: )

A 12 minute warm-up and a 4K (at a 24 strokes per minute over a split (500m) time of 1:59 average) later on the erg and it's all over. To make a long story short, I was in pain the WHOLE time. Like at the end, my quads are shaking, my arms are jelly and my heart is about to thump out of my chest! I don't remember what happened through the whole thing, but I remember certain moments like when I was in the last 1000m, I had one of the Varsity guys coaching me to keep "pushing hard" with "strong legs". Another was when 5 more Varsity guys joined him 500 meters later, or like when the "meters to go" display finally showed single digits. Seriously I thought that time would never come, but thank goodness it did.

The next day I show up at the Rowing room to find out I MADE IT!!! Woot! Turns out actually that I placed 32 in 50 kids, so I wasn't all that bad(:

The whole experience though sure has been amazing. Like today we had a workout in the morning and we were rowing in some really cool fog alongside another group of freshman in an "eight"(a boat with 8 seats). It actually was kind of cool cause not only was it really awesome to be an athlete here at Michigan, but it felt kind of like the Vikings, except a lot smaller and faster(: Haha plus, all the kids are very much not like the usual athlete. They're all clean-shaven and nice, and they're just like me and Ethan; happy, fun and diverse. The coaches too, specifically the Freshman coach, Coach Giacobbe, really are fantastic. They learned everybody's name by the first practice!

So just to reitterate my mom's words in her post about this whole thing, it was definitely destiny that I joined the Rowing Team. Everything just seemed to click and seriously I don't know what I'd do without it now!