The dust from big boats is off, the boat bay doors are wide open again, and Newport Harbor has those early-fall winds that make a good piece of water feel like a gift. The Junior Boys program is officially back in session – and if the first weeks of the rowing season are any indication, this is going to be a season worth following.
Here’s what’s happening on our end of the dock.
THE SEASON IS UNDERWAY – AND SUMMER PAID OFF
Fall training has started, and it started from a higher baseline than usual. We deliberately built our Varsity summer camps around small-boat work: singles, doubles, and pairs. There’s nowhere to hide in a small boat. Every timing error, every rushed slide, every lazy catch shows up immediately in how the hull behaves underneath you. That’s exactly the point.
Athletes who spend a summer in small boats come back to the eight as better rowers, not because they’ve gotten stronger, but because they’ve honed their rowing skill. They’ve learned to feel the boat instead of muscling it. You can see it already in how quickly our crews are settling into rhythm this month. Sets that used to take a full practice to find are showing up in the first twenty minutes.
BUILDING MEN, NOT JUST FAST BOATS
This is the part of the program that matters most to us, and we want to be direct about it: rowing is the vehicle, not the destination. Our primary emphasis this year is on team culture – specifically, on the kind of character work that turns boys into men other people can count on.
Three things we’re pressing on constantly:
- Teamwork over individualism: An eight does not reward the fastest guy. It rewards the guy who moves with seven others. There is no sport on earth that punishes selfishness more efficiently than rowing, and we use that.
- Service over self-interest: Being part of NAC means contributing to it – rigging, dock work, helping novices carry their first boat, showing up for the club and the community that supports you. Athletes who only take from a program never get much out of it.
- Resilience over fragility: Hard things are going to happen: a bad 2k, a seat lost, a race that slips away in the last 500. Our job isn’t to smooth the road. It’s to help these young men build the internal machinery to meet difficulty, absorb it, and come back the next morning. That skill outlasts every erg score they’ll ever post.
Fast boats are a byproduct of getting this right. We’ve never seen it work the other way around.
COLLEGE RECRUITING IS IN FULL SWING
Our seniors are deep in the recruiting process right now, and several of our athletes are in active conversations with top rowing institutions, including Ivy League programs.
That’s not a new story here. NAC has a long-standing tradition of sending athletes on to the best rowing schools in the country, and it’s something the program has built over decades.
It helps to remember what these young men are stepping into. Rowing is the oldest intercollegiate sport in the United States – the first Harvard-Yale race was contested in 1852, seven years before the first intercollegiate baseball game. The traditions that came out of that era are still alive: the Eastern Sprints, the IRA National Championship, the Head of the Charles in Boston every October. American collegiate crews have gone on to represent the country at the Olympic level for over a century. When a recruit walks into a boathouse at Princeton, Yale, Washington, or Cal, he’s joining a lineage that predates almost everything else in college athletics.
To our seniors: keep your grades up, keep your erg tests honest, keep answering coaches’ emails promptly. To our underclassmen: this process starts long before junior year. It starts with how you train today.
WELCOME PIERCE RANDS TO THE MEN’S COACHING STAFF
We’re excited to announce that Pierce Rands is joining our men’s coaching staff. Pierce will be working with both the Novice/U17 group and the U19 Varsity Boys.
Pierce is one of our own. He rowed here at NAC as a junior, went on to row at UCLA, and graduated with a degree in environmental science. Before returning to the club, he served as a Junior Guards instructor, which means he brings real experience teaching young athletes how to be capable, composed, and safe on the water.
What stood out to us most in bringing Pierce on is his genuine investment in the athletes themselves. He’s a coach who wants to be available: for technical instruction, yes, but also for the everyday advice and guidance that teenage athletes actually need. Having a coach on staff who has walked this exact path; NAC junior, then a collegiate rower, is enormously valuable for the young men now sitting where he once sat.
Please say hello to Pierce when you see him around the boathouse.
FIRST TEAM BONDING EVENT:
TEAM BOWLING, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
Our first team bonding activity of the year is team bowling on Friday, September 25th, the first in a series of events we’ll be running throughout the season.
We take these seriously, and we’d ask families to do!