To the untrained viewer, the small person sitting in the stern of a rowing shell may seem rather curious. They sit in the opposite direction of the rowers, facing them, and do not have oars. Their job is not to row, but to do everything else.
Motivating, communicating, coaching, strategizing, steering – that is a coxswain’s job. And while they may fly under the radar because they are not technically rowers, the rowers could not do their job without them.
Tessa Kurtzman, a 5-foot-tall senior, is a coxswain on the men’s rowing team at Marist. From being a complete novice just three years ago and the fourth and final coxswain on the team, Kurtzman has grown into the second coxswain out of eight, learning everything there is to know about rowing in that time.
Kurtzman got her start with the team at the beginning of her freshman year, after befriending some rowers who informed her of their need for a coxswain. Despite not knowing anything about the role and having to wake up at 6 a.m., she wound up falling in love with the job.
She had hardly any experience with sports in any sense before college; growing up, Kurtzman had mainly been a singer, something Marist men’s rowing head coach Campbell Woods thinks may actually help her as a coxswain because she is not afraid to use her voice.
In some ways, coxswains are the Swiss army knife of a rowing team. They have a lot of jobs, both in practice and out on the water, but only one of which is an actual physical activity that affects the race: steering. On the water, the coxswain is the only person facing forward and is therefore in charge of guiding their boat using ropes that alter the direction of the rudder.
“In the fall, in longer races, that’s where the steering really comes in because you can cut off meters. So, the better steerer you are, the easier the races, the shorter the races,” Kurtzman said. “In the spring, my job is to stay as straight as possible, right down the 2K course.”
Aside from steering, the jobs of a coxswain are far more mental and require proper planning, quick thinking, a thorough understanding of the intricacies of a race, the trust of coaches and rowers and leadership skills.
In a lot of ways, coxswains are essentially coaches for the rowers out on the water. Between correcting techniques, motivating and making tactical decisions, they do everything that a coach would do if they could be with the rowers during a race.
“The rowing coach’s job is very unique in comparison to other sports; we don’t make any game-time decisions,” said Woods. “We kick them off the dock to go to a race, and we just stand on land and watch them roll by and they have to execute the entire race themselves… and so the coxswain is like our proxy in the boat to deliver our strategy on the water.”
For Kurtzman, one of the most difficult aspects of being a coxswain, at least in the beginning, was having the courage to point out technical mistakes to rowers who had been immersed in the sport for years.
“That was a little hard for me to learn because I didn’t know what proper technique looked like,” Kurtzman said. “And then I got thrown in and I’m told to correct these guys that have been doing it all their life.”
Coxswains communicate with their rowers through a microphone that broadcasts their voice through speakers throughout the shell. When racing, there is less correction of technical form and more encouragement and tactical information emitted from the coxswain. When “walking up on,” or approaching another boat, Kurtzman will count down her location in relation to the seats on the next boat so the rowers can mentally keep track of their progress.
“I’ll say I’m on eight, I’m on seven, I’m on six and it’s as we’re moving forward. And that works, it gets them hyped up,” she said.
Sophomore Jackson Bower, the stroke in Kurtzman’s second-varsity shell that is seated closest to her, appreciates her efforts to keep the rowers aware of where they are in comparison to other rowers.
“I really like how motivational she is during races,” he said. “If we’re in a race with other boats all around us, she’ll be like ‘We’re on this seat, we’re on this seat, we’re walking away from these guys, let’s shut them down.’”
Aside from motivation, the tactical information that the coxswain communicates often stems from a race place. Rowing is not as simple as just hopping in the shell and rowing as fast as possible for the duration of the race; most races are too long for that to be feasible, as the rowers might tire out quickly. Instead, Kurtzman has to work with the coaches to come up with a plan for the race that she can implement on the water.
Sometimes, for example, the plan is to stay high off the start for a certain number of meters before falling into a base rhythm during the middle of the race and sprinting to the finish. A more conservative approach is to stay high during the first 400 or so meters, though Kurtzman has also employed the strategy of racing hard for the first 700 meters as well.
“That can be risky because it can tire them out,” Kurtzman said. “But if your crew can handle it, it can kind of scare the other ones, and then you fly away and all you have to do is hold on.”
Kurtzman called the race plans “skeletons” because they represent a rough outline for the race. They are meant to give the rowers an idea of what to expect, though different race scenarios can result in different strategies being employed. If the plan is to make a move to advance through the field at 700 meters, but another boat gets off to a big start, she may decide to be more aggressive as early as 400 meters to stay in the race.
Kurtzman is unique, first and foremost, because of her prior inexperience. It is not uncommon for rowers to begin their careers at Marist with zero experience. But for a coxswain, it is much rarer.
Rowing is actually much easier to learn on the fly than coxing, largely because of the deep understanding of the sport required of a coxswain. Kurtzman has had to learn the ins and outs of the sport: how to know when to have her rowers push and when to have them slow down, how to understand the terminology, coaches’ instructions and feedback from rowers.
“Initially, for a truly novice coxswain, they’ll spend some time in the launch with the coaches, watching what the other coxswains do, and then we’ll usually start them out in a slower boat,” Woods said. “And then combined with that, once every couple of weeks, we would throw her into a faster boat, a faster lineup just to give her a day experiencing what that looks like.”
Woods said that Kurtzman’s fearlessness initially set her apart from other novice coxswains. The role can be quite jarring to those without experience for quite a few reasons, but Kurtzman was ready to hop in and go, making it easier for her to learn and develop quickly – so much so that new rowers cannot even tell that she had no experience coxing prior to college.
“I actually didn’t know for the first month or two that she was a walk-on,” Bower said. “She’s a kick-ass coxswain.”
Edited by Sierra Fisher and Ben Leeds
Graphic by Jaylen Rizzo
Photo from Marist Athletics
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