Show up. Then show up again.

Preseason starts Tuesday. Before a single stroke, here's the thing that decides more seats than any erg score: whether you're there. Not there in spirit, not there when it suits. There, on the dock, on time, every session you committed to. The fastest girls in this club are almost never the most talented ones. They're the ones who showed up, and then showed up again.

Why attendance is a rowing skill

Rowing is the only sport where your teammate literally cannot practice without you. A four with three people is a boat that doesn't go out. An eight with seven is an afternoon on the erg for eight girls. When you skip, you don't miss practice; you cancel it for someone else. That's why we watch attendance the way we watch splits, and why the girl who is always there gets the benefit of every doubt when the lineups go up.

There's a quieter reason too. Boat speed comes from timing, and timing comes from repetition with the same people. Every session you're in the boat, the crew gets a little more like one animal. Every session you're not, it resets.

What a good practice looks like

Arriving on time means arriving early: changed, water bottle full, hands on the boat when the coach says hands on. From then on, the good athlete does three things. She listens to the whole instruction before she starts moving. She tries the change she's been asked for, even when it feels wrong, because the new thing always feels wrong at first. And she asks one good question rather than nodding through five.

Hands on means everyone

The rest is effort, and effort is simple. Nobody expects the best stroke in the boat on day one. Everybody expects the full stroke, every stroke.

The two-week rule

The first two weeks of a season are the hardest, and it's not the rowing. It's the alarm, the sore hands, the muscles you forgot you had, the feeling that everyone else knows something you don't. The athletes who quit almost all quit in the first two weeks. The ones who get through them never think about quitting again, because by week three it's simply what they do.

So for the next fourteen days, don't decide anything. Just go. Decide how you feel about rowing in October.

Seats are never owned

You'll hear this a lot at City Island and it's worth understanding early. Nobody has a seat. Boat speed decides lineups, and boat speed is measured, so every seat is earned on the water and can be lost there. That sounds harsh and it's actually the opposite: it means the path to the boat you want is completely open and completely in your hands. Show up, work, improve, and the lineups take care of themselves.

None of it is talent

For the parents reading this

The best thing you can do in preseason is make showing up easy: the ride, the early dinner, the bag packed the night before. The second best thing is to resist rescuing her from the first two weeks. She'll be tired and she may be grumpy. That's the sport building someone. Let it.

Listen to the whole thing, then move