"ONE. Big finishes. TWO. Into the body. THREE. Hit the legs.”
Coxswain Christen Young is growling into her microphone headset as she grips the gunwales, barking at the eight oarsmen facing her. Wired for sound à la rock stars, the sophomore leans forward and continues the in-your-face harangue, mixing it up with spicy asides.
Stars are piercing the gunmetal sky, and still the rowers stroke on. Although it’s only a practice, the two varsity shells, with Simona Chin at the opposing tiller, are racing for bragging rights as they slash through swaths of moonlight on the increasingly choppy bay.
“The women are the quarterbacks on these teams,” Craig Amerkhanian, director of rowing and head men’s coach, shouts above the roar of the motor launch. “It’s such a statement of their purpose and resolve that they know what buttons to push.” The two coxswains—and their counterparts on the women’s open-weight and lightweight teams—steer the boats, set the pace and coordinate the rowers’ strokes. They make sure the crew keeps 2,000 pounds of boat, oars and bodies balanced, and (because they are the only ones facing forward) the coxswains let the rowers know how far along the course they are—even though they can’t see the finish line over the big guys in front of them.
Weighing in at less than 110 pounds, the coxswains have to carry bags of sand in their boats to meet the required 115-pound minimum for races. But beware of unimposing, small packages.
“I’m one of those infamous Texas cheerleaders—a little person with a big, big voice,” says Chin, a senior who hails from Houston. “It may have been a temporary loss of sanity to become a cox, but now it’s what defines me at Stanford.”
Dressed in long underwear, ski pants, fleece jackets, mittens and multiple pairs of socks, Chin and Young maneuver their boats through nasty weather and around lumbering barges and tugboats. They sometimes attend team workouts—it’s a morale thing—and they race up Yosemite’s Half Dome with the guys each autumn. On the night before a race, they often lie awake, envisioning the course. “You think, ‘Crap, there’s a bridge, and then there’s a red marker as we come around,’” says Young. “It’s really nerve-wracking.”
On the water, however, the coxswains exude confidence. In November, Chin and Young led the varsity and novice boats to second- and first-place finishes, respectively, in Seattle’s Head of the Lake Regatta. “When they take a stroke that feels good, you yell, ‘That’s it!’” Young says. “Then it’s ‘Here we go—five more just like that!’”
