WATERFORD CREW, SO CLOSE, YET SO FAR
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. » You would think that members of the Waterford crew team wouldn’t have to take a six hour flight to row over the weekend on Fish Creek at Saratoga Lake, it’s typically just a short drive north on I-87.
But for the teenagers from The Waterford School in Sandy, Utah, just a half hour north of Saratoga Springs, Utah, that was the case as this spring rowing trip took them six hours by plane to arrive in Saratoga Springs, New York and this year’s Saratoga Invitational.
“This regatta only happened because the West Coast Scholastic Regional, which we have been trying to get going happened to fall on the same day as the prom and this is my girls season,” Waterford Crew head coach Andrew Henrikson said. “I’m not going to win that fight, so here we are.
“I called up (regatta director Chris) Chase and he was pretty excited about having a group come all the way from Utah.”
One intriguing fact is that The Waterford School is a neighbor to Saratoga Springs, Utah and only becomes more interesting when combined with Henrikson being a Skidmore College graduate who coached for a summer with the Saratoga Rowing Association before heading to Utah.
“It turns out if you’re going to study thermal geophysics you do it in Utah,” Henrikson said. “A real inflection point in my life was
when I realized that being a teacher sounded pretty good and one of the guys in my lab said ‘Did you ever look at Waterford?’”
“It turned out he had gone there and I met the head of the school and we clicked and I’ve been teaching there, about to finish my 18th year teaching high school physics.”
Another compelling moment for Henrikson came when he was asked to start up the Ravens rowing program.
“I had to choose between Utah Lake and the Great Salt Lake,” Henrikson said. “It just so happened that the site we went to at Saratoga Springs I said ‘ This would be too perfect.’ They even had a big facility; it looked like a regatta site waiting to happen, huge asphalt parking lot and then a big, shady grassy area with trees and stuff.”
But Henrikson didn’t get the same level of cooperation in Utah that the local Sarato ga Rowing Association has had through the years with its neighbors.
“We approached the home owners association of the development and they wanted nothing to do with it,” Henrikson said. “The folks up at the Great Salt Lake were very amenable, they are a pretty big sailing scene there and they though having juniors rowing was pretty cool. They’ve worked with us seamlessly.”
There are some differences for the Western school and rowing program too.
The school’s high school enrollment is approximately 240 students and still has two rowing seasons, fall and spring, but traditionally is divided by gender.
“I work with the athletic director so that we have mostly boys rowing in the fall and mostly girls rowing in the spring,” Henrikson said. “That allows the boys soccer (played in the spring) and lacrosse teams in the spring to have a little bit more robust team.”
Theweekend provided the Ravens to be tested not only by the teams lining up across from them at the start line, but also a rainy, cold Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning on Fish Creek.
“In the moment they look so miserable,” Henrikson said. “That quad that went out, there is a lot of surface area and not much mass, they cool off really fast. I didn’t want to send them out, but we’ve come a long way.
“I do think they are able to do this and able to do it well, but their eyes get opened to the conditions that people can be expected to operate in. Once they have enough hind sight, I think they’ll agree that it’s a fun experience.”
As an educator and a coach, Henrikson hoped that this trip to the East Coast was a learning experience for the Ravens.
“All of the rowers I brought on this trip are in either ninth- or tenth-grade and I want them to see what a really big regatta looks like,” Henrikson said. “I want them to experience the level of competition that they’re going to get and by having those experiences when we get back we have the conversation of ‘If you are really going to be serious about this you know the competition you are up against.
“If that boat beat you by 20 seconds in a six-minute race, what are you going to do to change that? That can be an interesting conversation to have with kids, the idea of training and conditioning consistently and intensely in order to be able to compete at a higher level is not something most teenagers jump at the chance to do. It’s an opportunity for them to realize what the context is for racing at the national scale.”