Star rower headed to Harvard

A 17-year-old senior at Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo, Walsh attracted attention from recruiters after placing third in a junior four-man boat in Cincinnati last summer at the U.S. Rowing National Championship Regatta.

His coach said what sets Walsh apart is his drive.

"He just has high expectations," said Coach Cassandra Cunningham on Monday. "That's what got him into Harvard. He has a vision and you can see it in his eyes — I noticed that in him when I started coaching him three years ago."

Like the other 79 boys on the Serra crew, Walsh gets up in the dark five days a week for 5:15 a.m. practice.

Now that he has his license, he drives his tan Dodge minivan down to the school's boat house in the industrial Port of Redwood City, takes the oars down to the dock, and sets a four- or eight-man boat on the water.

Blinking lights are attached to the bow and stern of the boats, and the crew quietly pushes off the dock while Cunningham follows in an aluminum motor boat.

The pre-dawn ritual is necessary because school starts at 8 a.m. and the water is smoothest in the morning.

As the crews go through drills and Cunningham yells at them through a megaphone to improve their strokes, Walsh focuses.

He takes each stroke sitting up, listening to his coxswain give directions while steering the boat, and he makes puddles by pulling hard on the oar.

It makes the boat go fast.

Each rower in the boat has to be strong and synchronized to balance it, but it's a safe bet Walsh is pulling hard if not harder than the others.

Because he was recruited as a lightweight, he has to "suck" weight to get down to 165 pounds.

If rowing for a few hours in the morning and weight training and rowing on a machine for a few more each day isn't enough, sometimes he can't eat afterwards.

Recently he had to lose five pounds in preparation for a national team tryout, so he worked out more and ate 1,500 calories each day.

"I felt pretty crappy for a while," he said.

Outsiders often wonder why people like Walsh row, why torture oneself in endless hours of training for a handful of races that last six minutes each?

In college, at least, rowers who win races enjoy the tradition of shaking hands with the losing crew and being handed, literally, the shirts off their backs.

But in high school, schools like Serra are not allowed to bet shirts.

"Yeah, what do we row for?" Walsh asked after a recent practice.

Walsh has won medals, like the gold he won with pair partner Greg Mason-Statler at the Southwest Regional Junior Championship Regatta last May.

But winning is only half the equation.

"There have probably been three or four times when I wanted to quit," Walsh said. "But I didn't want to let my teammates down ... because you're with the guys all the time and you sit in a boat with them all the time," he said.

"It's a positive peer pressure."

Get in the boat

Walsh's success has come at a changing time for Serra's crew. When Cunningham arrived in the fall of 2002, Serra had rowed in a combined team with two other Peninsula schools.

The club of 42 three years ago has grown to about 80 today, and Cunningham said Tuesday more boys want to row because the crew is now more competitive and gets them in shape.

It can also be a ticket to good college, maybe even in the Ivy League.

Greg Mason-Statler graduated from Serra in 2004, and was recruited by U.S. Naval Academy and the University of Washington, among others. He now rows at the University of California at Berkeley.

At those schools, rowers get varsity privileges with the rest of the athletes, gaining special access to classes and free travel to races.

"I think the school has finally recognized that this is something good for the boys," Cunningham said, "training them with the discipline to get up in the morning and getting them into schools. This is competitive. They mean business."

Each summer before school starts the Serra coaches invite incoming freshman to a two-day camp to try out rowing for the first time.

Many join to get in shape and stay because they have made friends.

Walsh's seventh-grade teacher at Crocker Middle School in Hillsborough often complained of waking up early in the morning to row, and he was intrigued.

When he enrolled at Serra he remembered her and began to row. He ran track, the 400-meter relay and high jump, and played soccer through his sophomore year. His grade point average is about 3.8 and he is interested in biology and political science.

Serra has given Walsh many awards, like a $4,000 Olympic Club Foundation Scholarship for his rowing and academic prowess, but he does not suffer from an inflated ego.

Cunningham said his lack of arrogance also sets him apart. He simply loves to row. Unlike last year's top Serra recruit Mason-Statler, who saw crew as a means to enroll at a top school, Walsh is likely to still be rowing in a few decades, Cunningham said.

When he's not rowing or studying, the Walsh is also kept in check by his pals at Serra.

In a December issue of the Serra Friar school newspaper there appeared an editorial entitled, "Sam Walsh typifies the ideal Serra student."

Gently mocking, the author wrote, "Yes, who doesn't love Sam? Sam Walsh, in addition to his brilliant mental capacity, has a stunning appearance: six feet tall, with an intensely muscular body and indescribably attractive features, steals the limelight wherever he goes."

The ribbing lasted for days.

Having received an advance copy, he said he was prepared for the jokes and incessant "intensely muscular" cat calls.

He laughed when he thought about it.

The future

The goal for this year's Serra crew is to make the eight-man final at the state championships, which would be a first for the school.

Walsh's goal is the same, but he's also looking to win state and compete on a national level.

The crew's first race is in early March at Lake Merced, and he will be packing up for Cambridge, Mass., this summer. He said he chose Harvard because he liked Boston's big city atmosphere, and the lure of day-to-day racing on the Charles with other crew-oriented schools like Northeastern, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.

His next act will be to catch the eye of the lightweight national team coaches. Last weekend, he broke his personal record on the rowing machine in front of them.

Like a lot of the crew experience, it was more rewarding than actually "fun," he said.

"Is anything fun in crew? It was fun in the sense that it was worthwhile," he said.

Stephen Baxter can be reached by e-mail at stephen@smdailyjournal.com or by phone: (650) 344-5200 ext. 109. What do you think of this story? Send a letter to the editor: letters@smdailyjournal.com.