Crew

Crew

The Hill Athletics program creates opportunities for student-athletes to compete at the highest level of independent school sports.  We are committed to providing an experience that develops character, emphasizes teamwork, and encourages healthy lifelong habits. Within that context, Hill crew seeks to kindle in each rower, at all levels from novice to varsity, a passion for the highest standards of balanced personal, boat, and team achievement.

We believe all growth and success comes from good operational skills: we teach rowers how to develop step-by-step goals and how to achieve them, integrating mental alertness, physical toughness, technical expertise, emotional steadiness, and a cheerful approach to life and especially to adverse weather and water conditions. We strive to win races as an expression of these attributes.

Hill crew’s highest values are athletic competitiveness, an irrepressible can-do spirit, and all-around sportsmanship—three areas that we believe define the sport of rowing. Our objective metric is thus boat speed and the winning of races. Race results—and regular, honest assessment of them—reflect directly the quality of both athlete and coach preparedness, consistency, and resolve. Hill crew’s subjective metric, to be developed over the four years of a student’s rowing career, is the development of good character. A specific area worthy of note is a healthy, mutually-supportive relationship between the boys' and girls' sides of the program.
 

Hill crew strives to compete aggressively in the MAPL Championships and other May championship regattas in order to attend Scholastic Rowing Association of America Nationals, National Schools Championship Regatta, U.S. Rowing Youth Nationals, Women’s Henley Regatta (U.K.), and Henley Royal Regatta (U.K.).  Similarly, in the course of striving to provide a premier athletic experience for all, Hill Crew expects to produce college-recruitable rowers and coxswains.  That expectation rests in part on the coaches’ development of passion and skill in all our athletes and in part on making Hill competitive with peer rowing schools for recruitment and financial support of rowing talent at the time of admission to Hill.

With School support, Hill crew is engaged in ongoing study of water, land, facilities, and endowment development to support this vision over both medium- and long-term time horizons.