The Friend file

It is a widely known fact that if you are a rower, all of your conversations, with other rowers or not, are about rowing. I would feel bad if you were an outsider listening in on such conversations. It's all about who rows how, and what this practice or that piece felt like, or this one time at crew camp...

Your team is family, and it makes sense to surround yourself with family.

I got nostalgic today and looked through some old yearbooks, junior high and freshman year in O'Fallon, IL. It surprised me how so many people will write such nice things about you and how we all should just keep in touch. Have a great summer, see you in high school!

My biological family was a bit scattered, and like everyone at that age, your friends are your family; and it makes sense to surround yourself with family.

However, the big difference between your biological and second families, is that your friends and teammates will always change. Rowers and boat lineups change as much as your revolving door of friends. New friends in, old friends go silent, especially if you're a military brat. One thousand+ Facebook friends equals about 5-10 true ones that will always respond to your text messages.

In my 8th grade yearbook, the longest entry came from my best friend at the time, Travis. He sat behind me in Honors Algebra; and without each other, we wouldn't have made it through the terror that was adolescence. He was the most open and ready person I could turn to. The next year, he didn't even sign. He told me once, "I'm too busy to start hanging around with people I knew in middle school."

You can imagine it broke my little freshman heart, and we weren't even dating. Eventually you block it out of your mind, and surround yourself with new people, different people. Drama comes and goes, but as a coxswain, you can't make it your concern. Everything will eventually change, but you only have one goal: to make every row the best.

The best part about my role is that I'm in charge of the boat, no matter who is in it. You do what's right for the boat, not for individuals. As much as I know that the relationships between rower and coxswain make a huge difference in chemistry, you must pull a Tim Gunn and make it work. Whether you have a V4+ made up of your favorite rowers, or a C8 made of people who have been rowing longer than you've been alive, it's up to you to make the best of it, and leave everything on the water.

So can coxswains really have friends when their goal is to win? Maybe not as easily as others, coming from someone who always felt a bit out of place in her rowing family... I feel weird being close friends with someone I have to be aggressive towards every other morning. Moreover, do we cox our non-rowing friends because we have trouble compartmentalizing our coxswain roles outside of practice?

Friends. Team. Family. Can a coxswain ever fit into either of these? If there is one thing that being a cox has helped for me personally, it is that I'll always be able to make it fit.