Trial by Fire

On a chilly afternoon in early October, eight freshmen line up along the edge of the dock, lift their boat over their heads and slowly lower it into the water. They step into the scull, careful not to upset its delicate balance. Even before they have reached for their oars, it is clear that some of them have been putting boats in the water for years, while others are doing it for the first time. This is the freshman men's heavyweight crew.

The veterans slide into their seats without displacing a drop of water. Wearing their high schools' "uni" — a one-piece, sleeveless spandex bodysuit — they look calm and confident. In the scull, they are at home.

Meanwhile, Justin Williams and Brendan Owen settle uncomfortably into the bow of the boat, struggling to gain their balance without sending their teammates headfirst into Carnegie Lake. They can count the number of times they have been in a scull on one hand, so they look around, trying to mirror the experienced rowers in front of them. They are anxious yet eager — and a little bit scared.

Unlike the vast majority of collegiate varsity sports programs, crews across the nation recruit only enough athletes to fill roughly half of their rosters; coaches count on unrecruited walk-ons to fill their sculls. Some walk-ons have rowed before, but most of them have never been in a scull or pulled an erg.

Princeton is no exception. The Tigers' heavyweight men annually field two freshman boats, stocked evenly with a combination of experienced and novice rowers, that travel to East Coast regattas during the fall and spring seasons. If these rowers stick with the program for four years, they are likely to row for a national championship before they graduate. Year-in and year-out, Princeton boasts one of the top crews in the country — over the past two decades, the men's and women's programs have combined to win 17 national championships.

But in early October, a national title is the last thing on anyone's mind. Any onlooker can pick out the novices in the freshman boats: they are jerky and awkward and have not yet embraced the spandex.

On Sunday, Nov. 13, at the Belly of the Carnegie — the annual freshman crew regatta that Princeton hosts for colleges from all over the East Coast — Princeton will launch two freshman boats. The goal is simple — the Tigers hope that no fan watching the boats from the Washington Road Bridge will be able to distinguish the novices from the recruits.

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It all began with the gauntlet. On Sept. 10, the coaches and varsity rowers lined the stairway to the basement of Frist, so each and every freshman would have to walk past them on his or her way to registration. They sized up the freshmen and called to them, demanding their attention.

"Did you play sports in high school? Join the Princeton Crew!"

While the coaches had spent months tracking their recruits, they identified and enlisted their walk-ons — who would play just as vital a role for the freshman crew program as the recruits — in a matter of seconds. For Marty Crotty '98, the coach of the freshman men's heavyweight boat, the targets were tall, broad-shouldered, fit-looking males.

More than 100 freshmen, most with no rowing experience, were intrigued enough that they showed up to an organizational meeting the following Tuesday. The prospect of playing a varsity sport at Princeton was enticing, so they came to find out if the gruesome stories they had heard about early morning practices were true.

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The recruits — among the most sought-after in the nation — were there as well. Guys like Matt Evans, an Eton grad who rowed for Great Britain's Junior National Championship team, and Chris Hearne, a former member of the U.S. Junior National Team.

They and their teammates sat in the back wearing t-shirts that said "Stroking it" and "St. Joe's Prep Freshman Eight: 2002 Regional Champions." They were already friends, and it was a foregone conclusion that rowing would have as big a presence in their collegiate lives as it did in high school.

But this meeting was for the novices — it was the coaches' chance to reel them in. The coaches said that the morning practices were an urban legend, and they promised a trip to the national championship meet for those who made it to the spring season.

"Some of the best rowers in history," varsity men's lightweight coach Greg Hughes '96 said, "national and world champions — were sitting right here in this room never having rowed before."

Eyes widened all around the room. Practice started the next Monday.

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On the first day, approximately 75 freshmen showed up.

Brendan Owen, a dedicated high school athlete, had never been in a scull before, but his father rowed in college and he figured he could get the hang of it quickly.

"Crew is one of the only sports that you can pick up right away and be good from the start," he said weeks later.

The freshmen split up into groups and got on the "ergs" — short for ergometer machines, which are stationary rowing machines used during the winter months and to train and test rowers all year long. As the novice rowers sharpen their technique, they will come to dread a day inside on the ergs.

Slowly, the freshmen learned the motion: ready position, body over, full bend, body over, ready position. The coaches walked around the room adjusting the rowers' strokes.

Justin Williams, a novice who was recruited by Division-I schools to run the 800-meter race in track but decided to try Princeton's crew program instead, marveled at the recruits on the ergs in front of him — "they could do it in their sleep, it was so fluid" — and he fought to find the motion for himself.

The third day of practice, the freshmen got into the tanks in the boathouse to learn the feel of the water and refine the leaning position they had been taught the day before. The next day, Thursday, two freshman men's heavyweight boats hit Lake Carnegie. They didn't cover much distance but worked on individual technique: one rower stroked while the other seven steadied the boat by holding their oars just above the surface of the water.

So far, the novices were pleasantly surprised by the physical intensity — it didn't seem so bad. They were encouraged by their slow but steady improvement as they moved from the ergs to the tanks to the lake. All the focus was on technique, not power. There were still more than fifty freshmen on the team. But then it was Friday, and everything was about to change.

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Fridays soon became notorious: the weekly erg test. Each rower gets on an erg and rows as hard as he can until he has covered six kilometers. The lowest times win.

"If you haven't done it before, it might be the hardest thing you've ever done," Crotty said. "It's simply how hard you can pull for how long."

The recruits and the novices were in the same room pulling as hard as they could. There was no lack of incentive: the rowers with the top 32 times would get to go out on the boats the next day, while the others would be inside on the ergs.

For the recruits, the test was demanding but familiar. For the walk-ons, it was a whole new world. Only a day before, the physical intensity had seemed manageable. Now the tides were changing, and some of them realized that this was not what they had signed up for. They were sore, blistered and bruised — and it was only week one.

"The first Friday totally killed me," Owen recalled, remembering pulling with everything he had. "[The recruits were] waltzing around having finished 15 minutes before, and I still had 1,000 meters to go."

But Owen reminded himself that the recruits were once like him.

"Coach expects 100 percent improvement every day," he said, and though both he and Williams questioned that expectation, they could see it happening. Despite the pain, the experience was addictive.

"It hurts sometimes," Owen said in early October, "but that's how you get better faster."

Within three weeks of climbing into a scull for the first time, Williams decided that he was in it for the long haul.

"I see myself doing this for four years and beyond," he said, his eyes wide and passionate. "I want to go as hard and high as I possibly can. I've never thought about quitting, not for a minute."

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But not everyone was so driven — for some, the intensity was too much. Whether or not the first erg test was intended to narrow the field, it did. The first wave of quits came that weekend.

Jordan Bubin was one of them. A football player in high school before serious knee injuries ended his career, he saw rowing as an opportunity to continue athletics in college. But he was disenchanted with the disparity between crew "as advertised" and what it turned out to be. He later called that first Friday the "weeding-out day."

Abba Leffler felt the same way.

"It wasn't that I felt I couldn't do it — I could have maybe swung it," he said. "But they falsely sold it a little bit. They made it seem like if I had been a high school athlete and showed up for an hour and 15 minutes every day I would make varsity."

As practices continued, more and more of the freshmen wondered the same thing: "Why am I doing this?" It was an understandable question, especially during the hardest of practices, when the oars ripped at their blisters until their hands bled.

Even the recruits who had been rowing competitively for years were being physically challenged more than ever before.

By early October, the team had been pared down even further. Only 16 freshmen were left: 10 recruits and six walk-ons. The crew could not afford to lose another man or they would not have two full boats.

"Coach made it pretty clear that no one else will quit from here," Owen said. "It's just the 16 guys now. We've started to have some camaraderie, and we're sticking with it."

But only one week later, the crew lost three more walk-ons. The freshmen who quit did not seem to leave with hard feelings — they simply realized that crew was not for them. Beyond the physical challenges, they realized the sacrifices they would have to make: academics, extracurricular activities and free time would all be secondary. The boathouse would have to be home; the crew had to come above all else.

"The guys who end up rowing for four years," Crotty admitted in October, "are a little bit nutty."

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For the next three weeks, the 13 remaining freshmen hit the water together every day, preparing for the Belly of the Carnegie. In mid-October, the three walk-ons still stuck out like sore thumbs next to the recruits, still struggling to learn that rowing is not about the speed of their strokes but about the rhythm and power. They try to mimic the recruits, but their strokes are not yet second nature.

Hearne looks back at the novices when the boat's rhythm is off and shakes his head. But the recruits also appreciate the novices' effort.

"In a way it's humbling; you see how much they want to improve and how dedicated they are already," Evans said. "You know that some of these guys are going to be in boats that you will race in, and some of them will end up being better oarsmen than you, so you help them as much as you can."

The recruits push the walk-ons in practice, not hesitating to give them advice. The walk-ons listen carefully.

"They will tell you if you're screwing up," Owen said. "It's not to put you down but to bring you up to their level."

He remembered high school sports and laughed — they couldn't compare.

"There is definitely no hand-holding here," he said.

That's what the coaches want. If you throw the novices into a boat of world-class rowers, they have no choice but to get better in a hurry.

"It's baptism by fire," Crotty said. "We teach them a few fundamentals, and then we get them out there taking strokes and they figure it out."

The fire comes when Crotty watches pairs of rowers individually while the other six steady the boat.

"Hey guys, I think we better get [varsity men's heavyweight head coach] Jordan over here," Crotty yells from the coaches' boat one afternoon, drawing confused looks from the freshmen. "I think Justin found a new way to row — everyone take a look! What are you doing moving your head all over the place, Justin? That's not what it's supposed to look like! Look at the guys in front of you!"

Williams, a track and cross country star in high school, is not used to this kind of critique. But he stares straight ahead and pulls as hard as he can, trying to correct his stroke under the pressure of his experienced teammates and the coach.

Sarcasm aside, Crotty is committed to helping his rowers, especially the novices, overcome their bad habits.

"I need to go find a drill to help [Williams] break that habit," Crotty says out of earshot of the rowers. "I need to figure out how to fix the problem."

Fixing the problem will include plenty of pain.

At the end of a practice, Crotty notices the novices in the bow of the boat letting up and asks if they have blisters. Williams nods his head.

"You just have to fight through it," Crotty yells back. "Don't treat it; it will just make it worse."

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Just before Fall Break, Crotty took the training wheels off. Instead of having six men row while the other two steadied the boat, all eight rowed at the same time, as they would in a race. As a crew, they were gaining the balance to steady their delicate scull.

On and off the water, the differences between recruits and walk-ons have blurred. By early November, it is no longer easy for a casual observer to tell them apart; the recruits and walk-ons are rowing in sync.

The experienced rowers can feel it, too. They aren't pulling a boat of inept newbies anymore; each seat is pulling its own weight.

The walk-ons are also adapting to the crew lifestyle. They have grown to love it: the calm of getting on the water and the euphoria of getting off it after winning an informal intra-team race, the big meal and deep sleep that follows.

"Now that I'm in it, I'm really starting to enjoy it," Owen says. "I'm starting to realize that getting out on the water can actually be fun. I'll definitely stick with it through freshman year."

Away from the boathouse, team camaraderie is growing. The freshmen eat meals together in the dining halls and hang out together at Cloister.

But, best of all, the work is paying off on the water. Their rhythm is steady, and they pull as a unit. They look less like a motley crew.

"It's actually looking good, guys," Crotty yells from the coaches' boat at the end of one practice. "Start getting used to how it feels to pick a boat and accelerate it. This is what it feels like."

They hope they'll have that feeling again on Nov. 13, when they race for a victory at the Belly of the Carnegie. But a victory Sunday is just the first step toward a goal that lies far beyond the Belly.

At the end of one practice, the freshmen look across the lake and watch the varsity heavyweight crew — arguably the best college boat in the country — fly smoothly over the surface of the water.

Even the experienced freshmen let their jaws drop a little, and everyone pulls harder. In three years, they want to be that boat across the lake.