The Tartan

Crew is quite a unique sport. A group of people get into a very long and narrow boat together and try to move fast. Usually, this involves either eight or four rowers, although sometimes it can be just one or two, and usually a coxswain, a person that sits in the back of the boat who steers, gives commands to the rowers, and helps keep the boat from crashing into things.

I was a coxswain for my high school’s crew team for four years. During that time, I gained a great appreciation for the sport and made wonderful friendships with the people on my team. However, I also noticed something strange.

The crew team at my school had some very cult-like tendencies. People usually didn’t quit crew, but if they did, they were first interrogated as to why they left, then told they should leave whatever sport probably made them happier and come back to crew, and then mildly ridiculed to the extent that was reasonable when discussing a high school sport.

I noticed this pattern and thought to myself: Why? To my knowledge, most other sports were not like that, or at least not as intensely. I came up with a few hypotheses as to why crew is so cult-y that I think explain this strange phenomenon.

First, in crew, teamwork is the most important part of the sport. The people in a boat need to learn to be completely attuned to each other’s movements. During a race, they all need to move their bodies at the exact same time, with the exact same pressure and angles to get maximum boat speed. This is why sometimes crew is called “the ultimate team sport” — all the rowers and the coxswain in a boat need to become one perfectly-tuned living machine.

This induces cultiness because all of the members of the boat rely on each other. If one person doesn’t show up to practice, everybody knows. Even worse, if someone doesn’t show up to practice, sometimes the whole boat cannot practice that day. At least in my high school, there were rarely substitutes available because if everyone did show up, the substitutes would be stuck on land with nothing to do. So if one person sleeps in or gets sick and doesn’t tell the coach beforehand, eight (or four) people do not get to go out and practice, and everyone knows who spoiled practice for them.

The second aspect of crew that lends itself to cultiness is the time that practice is held. In high school, we would practice around 3 p.m. most days, but sometimes we would have morning practices at 6 p.m. instead. In college, the varsity rowers practice at 5:15 a.m. during the week, meaning that people on the Carnegie Mellon crew team have to wake up before 5 a.m. to get to practice. In my opinion, this is much earlier than the average person wakes up (although I don’t have any real data about that).

Waking up so early most days of the week means that people on the crew team have to restructure their lives to get a reasonable amount of sleep. I feel like I socialize with my friends the most at night when we’re done with classes for the day. But crew members are awake and doing strenuous activities at 5 or 6 a.m., they probably do not have much time or energy to be in many other clubs that meet at night or socialize with non-crew people who want to do fun activities on school nights. Because of this abnormal schedule, it follows that people who do crew mostly only see other people who do crew, as they are spending lots of time at practice and regattas. This constant companionship means that crew is a very tight-knit group, but that also means that it’s hard to have relationships with people outside of the crew team.

The unusual sports schedule and the heavy reliance on teamwork make crew the cultiest sport. I learned this from my experience in high school and I’m sure that some aspects of it, if not all, are applicable to other crew teams. The cultiness may appeal to some people, and it is certainly not strictly a bad thing, but it is something that goes hand-in-hand with crew simply because of the nature of the sport.