©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Coaches’ dedication drives Mount St. Joe crew’s success
by TOM UTESCHER

The Mount St. Joseph Academy crew coaching staff: Front (L-R), Sheila Dyer, Megan Kennedy, Lauren Bair; Back (L-R), Stuart Chase, Jim Glavin, Mike McKenna (Photo by Margaret Kieffer)

On the cars of some Mount St. Joseph Academy rowers, parents and coaches, a bumper sticker reads: “Mount crew – enough said.”

To the uninitiated, that slogan may seem smug, but anyone familiar with the recent history of high school women’s crew knows that the Mount’s modern-day sweep-rowing program, started just seven years ago, has an impressive list of accomplishments to back up the boast.

Since 2002, the Magic have won a combined total of 16 gold medals, seven silvers, and three bronze medals in the premier national-level regattas for high school rowers.

This spring, the Mount St. Joe eights won three gold medals and a bronze at the Stotesbury Cup Regatta and three golds and two silvers at the championships of the Scholastic Rowing Association of America. The Mount’s lightweight eight went on to beat the top club crews from across the country, taking the gold medal at the U.S. Rowing Youth National Championships. No other high school program in the United States this year could claim anything close to that level of success.

It’s interesting to note that 17 of the 26 medals the Mount has won over the past five seasons belong to the lightweight eight (10) and freshman eight (seven) crews, because in those two categories, in particular, there is a relatively level playing field between schools. In lightweight rowing no one enjoys a significant advantage in physical size, since the competitors can’t weigh more than 130 lbs., and in the freshman eight category, nobody has much of an edge in experience.

What makes the Magic excel, many supporters will tell you, is the coaching staff that has come together at the Mount. Head coach Megan Kennedy graduated from Mount St. Joseph in 1992, when there was no rowing program at the local school. She took up crew as a freshman at Drexel University, becoming a coxswain for the men’s team. Mike McKenna, who works with the varsity rowers, coached at Drexel from 1973 to 1983, and was later drawn into high school coaching by his daughter Erin, a 2001 Mount graduate who helped establish the sport there.

Jim Glavin, a former college head coach at St. Joseph University, serves as a technical advisor for the Mount beginners, teaching the basics at an orientation camp at the end of each summer. His daughter, Emilie, rowed for the Magic from 2001 to 2004.

Stuart Chase, a former coxswain for Lower Merion High School (’91) and the University of Pittsburgh, joined the staff in 2005. After college, he had coached the women’s freshman crew at La Salle University, and was an instructor at Penn A.C. on Boathouse Row.

In the 2006 season, former college rower Sheila Dyer came on board to work with the Mount’s four-oared boats, and MSJ alumna Lauren Bair (’98) helped coach the first-year rowers. Another MSJ alum, Colleen Hughes (’01), lent a hand later in the season.

For three seasons back in the late 1970s, Mount St. Joe’s ran a sweep rowing program under the direction of alumna Lois Trench-Hines (’60), who had taken up the sport herself just after graduating from college. She says that the crew disbanded following an incident that occurred when another coach was running a practice session. The rookie rowers in the freshman eight came perilously close to the Fairmount Dam falls just below Boathouse Row, and nervous MSJ administrators shut down the program.

Several Mount students raced independently in the 1990’s, most notably Claudia Durkin (’99), who went on to row for the University of Virginia.

Kennedy, meanwhile, had been urging the Mount to establish a true team, and by the end of the decade, there were forces at work within the school as well. In the spring of 1999 Mike McKenna’s daughter, Erin, was a Mount sophomore who was coming off of extensive knee surgery she’d undergone her freshman year. She tried out for the lacrosse team but didn’t make the squad.

“She came home all ticked off, and asked me if I could teach her to row,” her father recalled.

She actually got out on the river that spring, racing a novice double with a freshman schoolmate. When her partner left Mount St. Joseph at the end of the term, McKenna had the option of rowing solo in a single, but instead, she set her sights on starting a proper team at the Mount.

Kennedy, who works at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, was spending her spare time as a coxswain and coach for men’s masters rowers at Bachelors Barge Club, while Mike McKenna, an engineer by profession, was coaching at Fairmount. They connected through a mutual acquaintance along the “Row,” and in the fall of ’99, they tested the waters at the Mount with the approval of the school’s president at the time, Mary Dacey, SSJ.

“With La Salle and the [St. Joseph’s] Prep rowing, so many girls at school had brothers or boyfriends who were into crew,” Erin McKenna said. “Some of my friends were interested in it, and girls I didn’t even know were coming up to me in the hallways asking how to get started.”

At the first meeting, 60 girls turned up. A follow-up session drew 40 prospects, and those 40 stayed.

“If we’d had 15 kids show up, we would have been a sculling program,” Kennedy said. “But to put 40 kids in boats and have them get out every day, you really need to be putting them in eights.”

The Mounties trained together that winter, and began to compete in the spring of 2000, operating out of the Drexel boathouse and from the old Canoe Club facility up near the Strawberry Mansion Bridge. They rented boats from Drexel, Villanova and La Salle High, and paid for off-water training time on the ergometers at Bachelors.

“We borrowed equipment anywhere we could up and down boathouse row,” Kennedy said.

“We didn’t have enough boats for the number of kids we had, so at practice one crew would row from the boathouse up to the Canoe Club, and another crew would jump in the boat and row it back,” McKenna said.

While McKenna and Kennedy’s tenure at Drexel did not overlap, they’d had similar experiences in the sport.

“For the most part, we run this program like a college men’s varsity program is run; that’s our background,” Kennedy explained.

McKenna, by his own admission a hardnosed taskmaster even in the eyes of male collegians, said, “If I had gone directly from coaching college men to high school women, it would’ve been a disaster. Fortunately, in between I had ten-plus years of coaching Erin’s teams in soccer and basketball, so I was able to tone down my act a little bit that way. Girls can take things very personally when you don’t mean it to be, so I’ve learned to say things differently. Actually, I was shocked at how little adjustment there was regarding the technical aspect of rowing.”

Jim Glavin would soon learn this, as well. McKenna and Glavin’s paths crossed and diverged repeatedly over the years. They competed against each other as college rowers and later as college coaches, and at the Mount their daughters were teammates in both soccer and crew. In terms of coaching philosophy, Glavin was pretty much on the same page as Kennedy and McKenna, assuring a consistent approach throughout the program.

For the 2001 season, the MSJ franchise moved from the crowded stretch of the Schuykill along Kelly Drive up to Conshohocken, operating from Villanova’s boathouse, along a row of rundown riverfront warehouses.

The Mount’s coach from the 1970’s, Trench-Hines, continued her involvement behind the scenes. She owns a business just across the river in West Conshohocken, and she helped the Mount St. Joe crew secure a facility of its own just a few hundred yards from Villanova’s venue.

Everyone involved with the Mount program pitched in to transform this ramshackle structure into a functioning boathouse, which was open in time for the 2002 season. With its rusty, industrial chic, it’s still no thing of beauty, but the rough-hewn nature of the place fosters an underdog mentality in the rowers, an “us against the world” attitude that helps draw the girls together.

Bonding is very important, Kennedy noted.

“We try to set the [line-ups for the] boats as early as we can,” she said, “and give the kids an opportunity to ‘click’ within their boat. Each crew seems to develop its own identity as the kids settle in and decide ‘this is our boat; let’s make it as fast as it can possibly be.’“

“I think, more than other teams, they make the boats like ‘one,’“ said rising senior Jane Mieczkowski, a coxswain who has earned national championships in the freshman eight, lightweight eight, and varsity eight. “They help us to become friends so that we work together better.”

For the first few years, the older girls on the team tended to be the best athletes, as well, and the roster for the varsity eight changed little. Eventually, though, the coaches had to make clear that the line-ups for the various boats could not be determined simply by seniority.

“It was probably in the third year that we drew a line in the sand as far as setting the culture of the program,” McKenna recalled. “We said the best eight people are going to be in the varsity eight, and the next- best eight lightweights are going to be in the lightweight eight and so on. At the time there were some hurt feelings and upset people, but since then that’s the way we’ve done it and we’ve tried to be consistent, and it’s pretty well understood by the kids and the parents and the school.”

It was in that season, 2002, that the lightweight eight won a bronze medal at Stotesbury, becoming the first Mount crew to medal at one of the top regattas. The next year brought widespread success, starting with five gold medals at the New Jersey State Championships. The light eight, varsity eight, and freshman eight each won silver medals at Stotesbury, and the lightweights went on to take the gold at the SRAA’s.

The first Stotesbury Cup gold medals came in 2004, courtesy of the junior (JV) eight, and the light eight. The Mount’s overall roster had grown to over 60 athletes, and about half of them now trained in the fall to get a head start on the spring season. The guiding principles of the program were firmly established, and the girls could see that their work ethic was yielding rewards.

“Success propagates itself,” McKenna observed. “The kids started believing ‘if we follow the program, then we’ll have success.’“

“They are always helping us to become better; you never sit back and say, ‘Okay, we’re good enough,’“ Mieczkowski said. “It’s hard to think of it that way at first, but in the end, it helps you really achieve something.

“At practice, even though it is hard, everybody has fun at the end,” the coxswain continued. “Even if the coaches are mad at us, they get over it. We get to do something fun at the end, like ‘crazy tens,’ which is how fast you can go up the slide (the rower’s rolling seat) and come back for ten strokes.”

“The coaches are really friendly, but they command respect,” said senior-to-be Emily Walker, who’s earned her share of gold medals first as a freshman rower and then as a two-year member of the varsity eight crew. “It’s sort of like a father/daughter relationship where you can be friends, but they’re still the person in charge.

“Mr. Glavin is the perfect technical coach,” she explained, “and he develops your technique freshman year, so that Mr. McKenna, who’s the perfect speed coach, can just focus on speed for three years.”

Two years ago the Mount St. Joe coxswains, already an accomplished bunch, got a boost when Stuart Chase joined the coaching staff. During the spring of 2004, he’d worked with high school girls for the first time at Bishop Eustace, just outside of Camden. In his full-time job in software sales, he was based just a few blocks from the Mount boathouse in Conshohocken, so he took the logical step and contacted Megan Kennedy that summer.

In the 2005 season he worked with all the MSJ coxswains, including talented freshmen Alicia Elliott and Devon Stewart, and this spring he also coached the Mount JV eight, a Stotesbury gold-medal crew.

“He taught Alicia and Devon really well,” Mieczkowski said, the varsity eight cox. “He brought in a system, and it was amazing how fast they learned. The coaches teach us [the coxswains] a lot, and then when we’re on the water they make us independent, so we don’t have to rely on them.”

“This is a fantastic place to coach, because you’ve got a group of girls who understand the effort that’s needed to be successful,” Chase said, “and they’re willing to put in the hard work. Not only do the girls embrace that concept, but their parents do as well, and as a coach – that’s huge. The parents are very supportive, but they also give the coaches the space they need to coach effectively.”

The Magic stepped squarely into the national spotlight in 2005, and then cemented their reputation this spring, winning more major races than any other high school program in the country. Dyer, a Merion Mercy Academy alum who rowed for the University of New Hampshire, and Mount grads Bair and Hughes were valuable additions to the coaching staff according to Kennedy, who pointed out, “It’s great for the girls to learn from other young women who’ve been down the path that they’re on now.”

The Mount’s coach emeritus, Trench-Hines, is boundlessly proud of the achievements of the modern-day crew, and is well aware that the Magic’s success starts at the top.

“I have never seen a team that has such dedicated coaches,” she said emphatically. “They’re extraordinary – true professionals. They take their vacation time to work with the girls and they make many other sacrifices. They set an example of excellence, and the girls follow it.”

Did the Mount’s mentors foresee the program becoming so successful in such a brief timespan?

“I thought we had the right ingredients to do it,” Kennedy said. “The girls just latched onto it, and approached it with a very ‘Mount’ mentality, which is ‘if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it at the highest level and we’re going to be the best.’”

“That’s the nature of the school population,” McKenna pointed out. “They’re highly competitive in whatever they do. I knew that before too long we could be competitive at the top level, because the novice eight made the semifinals at Stotesbury in our first year.”

While many schools have been able to put together one or two elite boats that medal at the national level, it’s the broad-based success enjoyed by Mount eights that sets the Magic apart.

“That comes from numbers, and good consistent coaching, but it also comes from the kids policing themselves,” McKenna said. “If a kid doesn’t want to invest the appropriate amount of time and energy, they tend to gravitate to other things.”

Lauren Bair agreed. “It’s not just our coaching staff, it’s the mindset of the kids, as well,” she said. “There is a sense of pride within each boat, and each boat is respected by the overall crew. The younger girls see what the older ones have achieved, and that’s who they want to develop into. Nobody wants to be seen as a slacker.”

“They all want to be here, and they train hard,” said Sheila Dyer. “They know that it’s still a sport and it’s fun, but at the same time they’re really competitive. It’s not always easy to have that balance, but here I think they’ve got it right.”

“All the things we only dreamed about doing back in 2000, the girls now are achieving left and right,” said Erin McKenna is I remember one time we were around when they were unloading the trophies that would be given out at the end of the Stotesbury Cup Regatta, and we jokingly held them up and posed for pictures like we’d won them. Just a few years later, Mount girls were holding those trophies up for real.”