What a Boat Teaches

What a Boat Teaches

Written after the BLS Crew senior banquet: observations from a counselor mom, and answers from the graduating seniors.

By Shuang Li

Tonight was the senior banquet of the BLS crew team my son rows for. The whole evening was organized by the parents of the graduating seniors: dividing up the work, setting up, running the evening. Everything was in good order. I deeply admire these parent volunteers and their selfless dedication.

For the past year and a half, I was busy with my own studies, and I barely participated in school affairs after my son entered BLS. This semester, I made up my mind to answer the call and contribute to the BLS community. This year the crew team has 21 graduating seniors, which means we need more kids to join, so that this high-level team can continue its success. So I did something within my ability: I interviewed the seniors and recorded their farewell speeches.

I write this with two identities. One is a crew mom, as my son trains on this team. The other is a counselor who focuses on adolescent mental health. Tonight, these two identities heard the same thing: a group of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, each in their own words, describing how rowing has helped shape who they are.

In this article, I want to put what I heard at the banquet together with research from developmental psychology, and share it with BLS families who are choosing activities for their children.

1. “My mom made me do it”

The most common opening in the rowers' speeches was not a great race result, but some version of “my mom made me join.” Every time, it brought a knowing laugh from the audience.

One senior who has rowed for six years told us about a letter she wrote to herself in seventh grade:

“I'm doing crew. Mama says I'm going to like it, but I don't think so.” She read that line, paused, and said: “As it turns out, my mother was right.”

Another senior had an agreement with her mom: finish the spring season first, then decide whether to quit. When the season ended, she found she no longer wanted to quit. Loving the races, loving the training, loving working hard toward one goal with people who cared as much as she did: this became the thing she looked forward to every day.

Here is a detail worth our attention as parents: these “pushes” worked, not because of their force, but because of the way they were done. “Try one full season, then decide”: give the child a clear trial period, and then hand the final decision back to the child. In developmental psychology, this is called autonomy-supportive parenting: parents can point out the direction, but the steering wheel stays in the child's hands. Children who are “pushed” into the boathouse this way will stand on a stage years later and say “thank you, Mom,” not “I'm finally free.”

2. What the research says: why team sports, and why rowing

I am always curious about the principles behind things. Why is rowing such a good choice? So I looked it up. According to Self-Determination Theory, our psychological well-being depends on the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Adolescence is exactly the stage when all three needs become intense, and at the same time can easily go unmet. And rowing, as a team sport, seems almost designed for these three things.

Belonging first. Belonging is one of the most basic human psychological needs; a long-term lack of it can even lead to anxiety and depression. And team sports are a reliable way for adolescents to find stable belonging. A large 2022 study published in PLOS ONE, based on 11,235 US children aged 9–13, found that children who played team sports scored about 10% lower on anxious/depressed measures, about 19% lower on withdrawn/depressed measures, and about 17% lower on social problems, compared with children who did not play sports. These studies show correlation, not necessarily cause and effect. But they all point in the same direction: for a teenager's mental health, who they exercise with may matter as much as whether they exercise.

And belonging brings us to friendship. When I talk with parents of teenagers, the worry I hear most often is not grades, but social life: “my child can't make friends.” Team sports are probably the most natural place for teenagers to make friends, and a sport like rowing, which requires such close cooperation, is especially so: the friendships in a boat are not talked into being; they are trained into being. Sweating together, losing together, winning together, day after day: that is how the bond grows. One rower told me in his interview that he also has regular friends at school, friends he plays games with or takes classes with, but everyone on the crew team knows how much effort it takes to be part of this team. “The friends and the community crew has, you can't really find anywhere else.”

Competence next. Research has found that sports bring stronger psychological benefits than general physical activity (higher self-esteem, better peer relationships, fewer depressive symptoms) because sport is structured, has continuous peer interaction, and offers many opportunities to master skills. Rowing is almost transparent on this point: the 2K score on the erg is an honest number, and progress is visible. What psychologists call the most important source of self-efficacy, mastery experiences, happens every day in rowing training.

There is also one study about rowing itself that is worth mentioning. Researchers at Oxford had members of the university boat club train alone and train together in synchrony. They found that synchronized rowing produced a significantly stronger endorphin response than the same training done alone; the researchers called it the “rowers' high.” Moving in synchrony is one of the oldest social bonding mechanisms of human beings (think of singing in a choir, marching, dancing), and rowing demands more synchrony than any other sport. Maybe this explains why, in tonight's speeches, the word the kids used most to describe their teammates was “family.”

3. The kids' own answers

Research gives the framework and the principles behind it; the kids give the most real feelings. The quotes below come from the speeches at the senior banquet and from my interviews.

On trust.

“You can't isolate yourself when you're in the boat. You have to be present. You

have to work hard.”

“On the swim team, if one person has a bad swim, it only affects their own race. But in crew, every stroke affects the whole boat. No one wins without the rest of the boat, and no one loses without the rest of the boat.” (a senior who swam competitively for years before rowing)

“What we've really been building these six years, besides 2K scores, is our support system. You have to trust that the people in front of you want it as badly as you do — and be willing to put it in their hands.”

On discipline.

“Crew taught me discipline. Two hours a day, six days a week, plus regattas on weekends — you have to stay on top of your schoolwork, or you simply can't do it.”

On losing.

“In my first race we got smoked. We were so far behind. But I still had a great time, and I was proud of us.”

“All the effort you put in might still not be enough to beat the fastest boat. But you can't change the other boats — you can only focus on what you can change in yourself.”

“The silence after a race that doesn't go your way can turn into finger-pointing. The way through is to sit down as a team and talk: what did we do well, what can we improve. That debrief moment is always the best medicine.”

As a counselor, I want to talk about what is inside these three quotes.

There is distress tolerance; there is an internalized locus of control; there is a team attribution that faces the solution rather than the blame. These are capacities that often take us many sessions in the counseling room to help an adolescent slowly build. On this team, they are practiced naturally, six days a week.

 On the place of this sport in a child's life.

“As soon as I step into the boathouse, all my problems disappear, and my mood is immediately brightened.”

“The last few grueling minutes of an 8x500 may not be fun. But you know what will be? — Being done with it, and knowing you tried your hardest and got a little bit faster.”

People in outdoor sports call this Type 2 fun: hard in the moment, joyful in the remembering. For learning delayed gratification, there is probably no more effective training than this.

“I would not be the person I am today without this team.”

“It's my second family.”

One more thing I want to mention, an overall impression from interviewing these kids and listening to their speeches tonight: every one of them was confident, logical, and articulate, and every one of them was grateful and valued their relationships deeply. To me, this is another piece of evidence for the benefits of team sports.

4. To the BLS families who are considering

If your child does not yet have a sport of their own, please seriously consider rowing. A few practical reasons:

It has no barrier to entry. BLS Crew has no tryouts and requires no experience. As one rower said in the interview: “There's no tryouts. There's no barriers to entry. You can just do it. All the novices start from zero; you're all, literally and metaphorically, in the same boat, learning the sport together.” For kids who did not grow up in the club-sports “arms race,” this is almost the last door in secondary school that is still wide open.

It is a year-round commitment. Fall and spring on the Charles River, winter indoors for conditioning, six days a week. I don't want to play down this investment. The kids themselves say the time commitment is the hardest part of this sport. But please read their words above once more: the discipline, the support system, the second family. All of it grows out of this commitment. In this sport, the intensity and the meaning are the same thing.

Parents will gain a community too. The carpool rotations, the purple ponchos on the riverbank, the volunteer tents on regatta days. In their speeches, the seniors thanked not only their coaches and teammates, but also each other's parents. When your child joins a crew team, you join a community of parents who give selflessly to this community and support their children unconditionally.

Finally, as an educator and counselor who has worked with adolescents for over twenty years, I want to say this: this generation of teenagers faces an environment that keeps pushing them toward screens, toward comparison, toward isolation. Research and practice give the same answer about the “antidote”: a stable group in the real world, where people share the load and need each other. An eight-person racing shell is exactly such a thing: it physically requires eight people to be present at the same time, breathe in the same rhythm, and pull in the same direction.

For recruiting information, please watch the school's channels and the announcements from Friends of BLS Crew, or simply talk to any parent on the team, and we are all glad to answer questions.

Please feel free to share this article with BLS families around you who are still deciding.

References

The studies and theories mentioned in this article are listed below, for parents who would like to read further:

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman.

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.

Cohen, E. E. A., Ejsmond-Frey, R., Knight, N., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2010). Rowers' high: Behavioural synchrony is correlated with elevated pain thresholds. Biology Letters, 6(1), 106–108.

Eime, R. M., Young, J. A., Harvey, J. T., Charity, M. J., & Payne, W. R. (2013). A systematic review of the psychological and social benefits of participation in sport for children and adolescents: Informing development of a conceptual model of health through sport. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 10, 98.

Hoffmann, M. D., Barnes, J. D., Tremblay, M. S., & Guerrero, M. D. (2022). Associations between organized sport participation and mental health difficulties: Data from over 11,000 US children and adolescents. PLOS ONE, 17(6), e0268583.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.