Rowing in Color brings visibility to light

Rowing’s color palette has always featured one prominent shade — white. Former coxswains and colleagues Denise Aquino and Patricia Destine want to change that.

The Head of the Charles returned to Boston this weekend, and for the first time an allBlack boat took the water in the women’s club eights. An all-BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) boat is scheduled in Sunday’s Directors’ Challenge mixed eight. Both are sponsored by Rowing in Color, a nonprofit podcast they cofounded dedicated to increasing visibility within the rowing community.

“We’re not the diversity boat. We believe in passing the mike forward,” Aquino said. “We want to stick out in a way where you can’t unsee the representation and the visibility that we’re bringing.”

Destine explained initially, they connected with a lot of their athletes through social media because they were just making sure to fill the boat. Seeing everything come together has been surreal.

“Literally watching them shove off the dock . . . that picture is going to be in someone’s boathouse, someone’s locker room someday. It’s powerful,” she said.

Rowing in Color was created before the pandemic in 2020 by Aquino and Destine, the only two colleagues of color when they coached a middle school rowing team.

“We were coaching mostly people of color on the team, and that was really special for us. We just worked really well together at the time, and even though we’re not coworkers anymore, we still kept the professional relationship,” Aquino said.

According to Aquino, their mission as an organization is to “amplify” rather than “advocate,” to give rowers of color a space to share their stories, and tell those stories themselves.

“We have to shed light on Black women, especially in sports, because the kind of light that they get in sports journalism already usually doesn’t reflect the talent, the competition, and general skill that they bring to the sport,” Aquino said.

These are the first boats sponsored by Rowing in Color, and nearly all will be rowing together for the first time. Nearly all of the athletes have rowed at the collegiate level and beyond.

Bringing these boats to the Charles isn’t just an attempt to increase representation.

“We’re not the diversity boat, we’re not the charity boat, we’re legit competitive, we’re legit fast. We planned with these intentions, knowing that we had a lot of things to do that we never did before, like vendor partnerships,” Aquino said. “We have our own unis and everything, and we did a lot of things for the first time. But we wanted to make sure that everything that we did was rooted in our values and rooted in our goal to promote visibility and pass the mike.”

Rowing in Color “A” finished 31st in the women’s club eights, and eighth among the 14 club shells in the field.

There is a lack of representation in rowing. The 2018 diversity and inclusion scorecard for US Rowing indicated that there were no rowers of color on the national team, and only 14.87 percent of those affiliated with the organization did not identify as white. On the collegiate level, the NCAA’s 2021 study on race and gender found 77 percent of female collegiate rowers and 60 percent of coaching staff identified as white.

This weekend’s boats feature notable rowers of color, including Corin Wiggins — known on social platforms as The Black Coxswain — and Baylor Henry, founder of Black Girls Row, both of whom have been featured on the podcast. Courtney Wilson, a former race director, race committee member and volunteer, is serving as assistant team manager.

Sebastiana Lopez, a junior in the rowing program at Temple, will coxswain in Sunday’s Directors’ Challenge mixed eight. Joining this inaugural effort wasn’t a hard decision for her.

“I immediately said yes,” she said with a laugh. “Just knowing I was going to have the opportunity to cox for all of these experienced rowers, people of color, it’s absolutely amazing.”

Henry said she felt a lot of pressure to participate, but after a lot of council, ultimately decided it was the best decision for her.

“I really just want to inspire other girls. When I first came to Head of the Charles, I didn’t see anyone who looked like me,” she said.