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| Stanford's women's varsity crew |
I will start with the sport of rowing, or crew. The easiest way for me to ensure that you understand that I am NOT talking about Kayaking and I am NOT talking about Dragonboats or canoes is to include a picture.---->
Rowing, or crew, is considered one of the oldest sports (right up their with wrestling, running, and other track sports). Although, when it first brought in to the world it was a form of slavery and torture. Have you ever seen those old viking movies where they have people with big long sticks under the ship chained to their seats? That's rowing.
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| Movie depicting slaves rowing in big ship |
Rowing branched from slavery, to torture, to an Olympic sport and absolutely no one knows about it. Well, ok, obviously some people know about it, but people in Arizona don't really understand it. So here's the crash course.
Rowing is the ultimate team sport. You can have as many as eight people rowing a boat and as little as one. There are singles, (one person), doubles (two people), pairs (two people,) quads (four people), fours (four people), and eights (eight people). As the boats get bigger, like the fours an eights, the oars that each rower has is only one (like the Stanfords 8 above). As the boats get smaller, each rower has two smaller oars with one in each hand. It is highly competitive, a huge collegiate sport, and is extremely prestigious with the best teams belonging to Ivy league schools. It is the only sport where every country in the world that participates in the Olympics, participates in the race during the summer Olympics. Personally, if you want to be good at the sport you have to be relatively large (women are preferred to be above 6'0, and men about 6"4) and lean. If you're good at the sport or if someone thinks you can be good at the sport, the sport will become your life, it will absorb you and spit you out as a whole new person in both a metaphorical and real sense.
So, back to the internship. I am helping with Desert Sprints Regatta which is a rowing race that the City of Tempe puts on annually on Tempe Town Lake. As a rower myself, being able to help set up and see the race course come to life makes it all the more enjoyable for me and helps me appreciate all the work that goes on in the background to make things like this happen. Alicia and Ryan, my bosses, have been working on the creation of Desert Sprints since August of 2014. while the only real part I'll be helping with is the set up (because it takes 3 weeks to do), there are hundreds of other things to worry about like bathrooms, security, emergency service, website registration set up, race times and scheduling, placing each boat in the appropriate race, hiring officials, finding volunteers, food vendors, trash pick up and collection, announcers, course set up, finish-line camera/crew, and individuals tents for the teams that are attending.
The thought of handling all of that by myself scares me. So watching my bosses actually accomplish it is so inspiring. They have to be unbelievably organized in order to accomplish this race and make it run as smoothly as possible.
Desert Sprints is on March 7th and is an all day event. Teams from California, Oregon, Washington, Texas, Colorado, and Utah come to participate and race against each other and local teams. There are junior, master and veteran categories which are all then divided up between the three into the different types of boats that I explained above. With the magnitude of races being offered, racing happens non-stop from 6 am to 6pm that Saturday. The thing I am most concerned about is that I am both coaching the juniors (my team) and expected to be available at the drop of a hat if anything goes wrong and my bosses need me to step in and add extra help.
I am very excited, but very scared at the same time. I've been participating in Desert Sprints since I was 13, but I have never held responsibility to ensure that the event is actually executed properly.
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