What’s Inside Bulletin No. 23 • Great Dome Award to MITCAA • Alumni/ae Spotlight • Fund raising update • We thank our donors • !Squaring the Blade! IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS The coaches’ newsletter, Squaring the Blade, is announced and made available only on the internet, hence those crew alums who don’t have that access don’t receive it. We’re experimenting in this Bulletin with including it in our hard copy version being USPS mailed to those MITCAA members and others who have told us they prefer to get it that way. The current Squaring the Blade starts on Page 17. UPCOMING MITCAA EVENTS One of these events is on April 21 in Cambridge, when all 4 MIT Crews will be competing on the Charles River. The MITCAA is hosting a breakfast at the Alumni Association Building at 600 Memorial Drive, and there will also be refreshments at the MIT Boathouse. You can sign up for this "Day on the Charles" by filling out the form at http://www.mitcrew.org/DayOnTheCharles.html . Or you can contact Mark Barron at [email protected]. Other events, which are still being planned, are alumni gatherings at the men's EARC Sprints in Worcester, MA (May 13), and the women's Dad Vails in Philadelphia, PA (May 11-12) and EAWRC Sprints in Camden, NJ (May 13). Details will be coming soon, but in the meantime if you have questions or comments contact Mark Barron at [email protected] . We are looking for volunteers to help coordinate the Camden EAWRC Sprints on May 13, so if you can lend a hand please contact Cynthia Lin at [email protected]. HEAD OF THE CHARLES CORRECTION We regret the inadvertent exclusion of the following information from the Head-of-the-Charles / MIT Alums Wrap-Up article by Cynthia Lin in the last bulletin. Participant Name MIT Event Team Name Seat Place Adjusted Time Rowing Class Peter Billings 1973 11-Alumni Eights Men MIT Grad Crew Bow 29 17:52.85 Matthew Coates 1998 11-Alumni Eights Men MIT Grad Crew 3 29 17:52.85 Robert Lentz 1998 11-Alumni Eights Men MIT Grad Crew 2 29 17:52.85 Tara (Tyndall) Neider 1983 6-Senior Masters Women Eight Alexandria Crew Boosters 7 9 19:12.04 Don Saer 1971 11-Alumni Eights Men MIT Grad Crew 8 29 17:52.85 Larry Sweet 1974 11-Alumni Eights Men MIT Grad Crew 5 29 17:52.85 Guillermo Vicens 1970 11-Alumni Eights Men MIT Grad Crew Cox 29 17:52.85 1 This award was made possible by your continuing support, encouragement, and enthusiasm for crew at MIT. The MITCAA board of directors congratulates you and thanks you. 2 ALUMNI/AE SPOTLIGHT by Cynthia Lin The idea for a periodically recurring feature article in the Bulletin-- - Alumni/ae Spotlight -- is the brainchild of Cynthia Lin’07, an MITCAA board member. In her words, “I thought it’d be neat for the broader MIT rowing community to get acquainted with their fellow rowers and coxswains, and learn about what they have been up to since graduation. After all, we are the alumni association of MIT crew. If you would like to be featured in an upcoming Bulletin or if you want to recommend a fellow rower/coxswain, please contact me, at [email protected]” “I had the pleasure of exchanging a few emails with Linda Muri ’86 this year and I think she’s a fantastic person for this first piece. She has seen the rowing world from a variety of perspectives (competitive rower, boat builder, coach) and I think we can each relate to an aspect of her experience. She’s been coaching the Harvard's freshman lightweight men’s team for the past 10 years and led them to a 10-0 lightweight freshman dual record and an EARC silver medal in 2010.” And when, by chance, her first target turned out to be Linda Muri we pounced on the opportunity to append a companion piece we ran out of space to include in Bulletin 21. (1) Tell me a little bit about your involvement with rowing over the years. From your time at MIT, to your transition to competitive training and racing, and finally to coaching at Harvard. I never anticipated rowing before I came to MIT, although I do remember that the prospective student information booklet had either sailing or rowing on it which made me think MIT would be a good place to go to school. I had other sports in mind and just planned to follow the same path as in high school, more or less – Field Hockey, Basketball, and Track or Softball. (There was no Track & Field team my freshman year and a few of us women were part of the Club team. I remember only one meet – not enough fun.) Through living at pika, I was picked up for Class Day (the fall Intramural race among dorms and ILGs) by some of my housemates who rowed. I thought it was a lot of fun, and I like them, so starting to row made sense. However, my first morning practice with the team in a barge put me off rowing for another year. So, another Class Day, and like I said, not enough enjoyment from the other sports, and I rallied to give it another try. I talked my roommate, Nancy Walworth ‘85 to join with me and we started in late November after the last fall race of the season, a couple of days before indoor training began. I really enjoyed the training and competition. My novice year, we raced all kinds of traditional Cup races, all the Eastern Sprints schools, just like the men – Radcliffe & Brown, Princeton & Yale, Rutgers, Boston University & Northeastern. The tradition of the sport totally appealed to me. I got so caught up in it, that I tried out for the National Team in 1984 after two years of rowing and got invited to Selection Camp. By the time I graduated, though, we were only racing Division III schools and I felt totally betrayed and let down. On top of it, we didn’t win a race my last two years on the team. 3 I wanted more, and decided to learn to scull and see how far I could get after graduating. It took some time for me to figure out how hard I actually could train and how hard I needed to train to succeed at the National and International level, but all that appealed to me about rowing at MIT was there again after graduating. The way I ultimately got into coaching was fairly round about. Coaching initially was something I picked up my senior year. We practiced in the mornings, I didn’t have any labs, and my afternoons were free. I decided to apply for a coaching job at the Middlesex School in Concord, MA. They tried to get me to run the whole program, but I made the sane decision for everyone involved to only be an assistant coach. I thought it was great, felt like I was giving back to the sport, but I never thought it would be my profession. I continued to dabble as a coach, mostly in learn-to- row programs. While I was training for the National Team, I knew I needed to have a plan for retirement and the engineering seemed unlikely to fit the bill. I’d enjoyed teaching and working in classrooms with young people, so teaching made sense. After I finished my Masters in Education, I had to pass up on a few high school physics positions because my Worlds Competition schedule didn’t allow me to hit the start date for the academic calendar. Then, my future husband and I moved to Ithaca, NY, so he could go to the Johnson Business School at Cornell. I planned to keep training and finally get into the classroom through substitute teaching and/or tutoring. It turns out, Cornell was still looking for a coach two weeks into the school year and they contacted me about applying. A few months into the position, and I was hooked – I knew that coaching was what I wanted to do. After my husband finished school, we thought about where we could move so he could find a job. I wound up with offers from the Yale women and the Harvard lightweight men. We both loved living in Boston, so it was an easy decision. (2) Why did you pick MIT for your undergrad? Having grown up never more than a 7-hour drive from Boston wherever we lived, I liked the idea of living on the east coast or at least the northeast. I definitely researched schools where there was strong engineering academically, and where there were active athletic programs. Biomedical or Aerospace Engineering appealed to me as avenues to becoming an astronaut or at least involved with the Space Program. My parents took me to visit most of the schools I applied to, but MIT clicked both on paper and in person. Well, Brown did, too, but we know how that turned out. I actually didn’t make my decision until the very last day possible and did everything I could to keep away from a coin-flip. (3) Programs want to field the strongest and fastest crews. On the issue of recruitment, how should rowing programs balance the environment to encourage and invite “walk-ons” vs. training experienced high school “recruits”? It is important to encourage the walk-ons to field a strong team.