Rowing takes young athlete from Regina to Ohio State University
Kendell Massier was once a national-level diver mending a broken leg, but today she is a promising young star with the Ohio State Buckeyes rowing team.
“I was just some 14-year-old kid pushing off in a boat for the first time thinking, ‘Well, I hope I don’t suck at this,’ ” Massier recalls of her introduction to rowing.
During rehabilitation from the broken leg, Brie Jedlick — a rower and Massier’s sports psychologist — convinced Massier to give the sport a try.
Garett Mathiason, Massier’s coach with the Regina Rowing Club, recalled her excelling at rowing very early in her career. By the summer of 2013, she was already competing in the Canada Summer Games and the national rowing championships, winning silver medals at both.
“I was always impressed with Kendell’s enthusiasm to race,” Mathiason says. “She is a very good racer and committed to all the work put in front of her.”
That commitment to not only racing but getting better is what fuelled Massier — so much so that she refers to rowing as an addiction.
“I just thought it would be something that I could get good at and something I could work toward, but it wasn’t something easy to jump into, so it kept me going — to get better and be faster and work my way up the ladder,” she says.
She continued to climb up the ladder, making it as high as the world junior rowing championships. She competed at worlds in 2015 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and this past August in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Throughout her run of national and international championships, Massier set a goal of rowing at an American university on a scholarship. She started researching different schools and was contacted by several of them, starting when she was in Grade 11. In Grade 12, she was able to tour five different universities, one of them being Ohio State.
“I just loved the school,” she says about her visit. “The atmosphere and team was amazing and all so supportive, so I just knew that was the school for me and I definitely wanted to be on this team.”
Massier was late getting down to Columbus, Ohio, because she was competing in the Netherlands, but says her teammates have helped her adjust to the campus and the team. The Big 10 conference rowing season doesn’t start until the spring, so Massier is focused on her training and helping out a Buckeyes team that has a rich history in rowing.
Looking back, Massier says she never would have expected rowing would take her to this point, and she’s quick to credit Mathiason.
“He mentored me and moulded me for all the competitions and pushed me to a new level every winter on the (indoor rowing machine) and every summer on the water to see how much better I could do and how far I could push myself,” she says.
Mathiason, meanwhile, is excited that Massier has worked for the opportunity to learn new things and advance her career.
“She will be rich from those experiences and we’re excited for her to bring some of those experiences back this coming summer for the 2017 Canada Summer Games,” he says.