St. Ed’s senior Kylie Oakes parlayed a tip from a friend with some unexpected encouragement from a coach into the journey of her dreams through high school. It all started her freshman year when she joined the Pirates’ rowing program as a novice who was about to grab an oar for the first time.
“I immediately thought that it was not for me, it’s too hard, and that I wouldn’t like it,” she recalled. “Then my friend said come to ‘learn to row’ day. So we went out on the water and it was really pretty nice.
“The coach (Aaron Lee) thought it was something I could really be good at. No other coach ever told me that I had athletic potential or that I could be good at something. I did ballet for 12 years so I’ve never been the athletic, sporty type. He told me that if I was willing to put in the work and do what I needed to do, I could go far with it.
“I was really excited to hear that, and prepared for a change in what I wanted to do. I started in a double with (University of Virginia-bound) senior Maggie Taylor. She had been rowing for a long time and had a lot of success. I had never rowed before and didn’t know what I was doing.
“She was really great about introducing me to the sport. We went through the season and there were some setbacks with me figuring out how to row. At the end of the year we qualified for the Stotesbury Cup scholastic national regatta in Philadelphia.
“We didn’t do very well but it was a really good opportunity for me to see how big rowing is. For the first time I realized how extensive the sport is and how many people are involved.”
Competitive rowing is as old as the hills, and the sport has recently become a vehicle of bountiful opportunity for high school students to open doors. That very humble beginning, with an immediate taste of the limelight at Stotesbury, lit a fascination that evolved into a burning desire to excel.
That summer Oakes attended college rowing camps at Duke and Virginia. She returned for her sophomore year only to discover that St. Ed’s disbanded the crew program. Of course, she wanted to continue with the sport and found an outlet with the nearby Vero Beach Rowing Club. She was partnered in a double with a future D1 rower for the University of Rhode Island. They missed nationals by a few seconds. The disappointment just added more fuel to the fire.
“That was the end of my sophomore year and I definitely wanted to go away for another camp, this time for an extended period of time,” Oakes said. “A camp in Boston (CRI) had a dorm option so you could stay for two months. We competed in two regattas, including the Canadian Henley. I had never raced in an eight before and we got first in the U17 category.
“After rowing twice a day for two months I got a lot better and much more physically fit. But I also grew a lot as a person. It was my first time away from home for that long. I met people from all over the country, and decided that I wanted to get recruited to a very competitive university rowing program.”
Knowing that serious rowers train year-round, Oakes was prepared for her first fall club team season. About a month in, she was doing land-based cross training when she broke a wrist during one of the exercises. The timing couldn’t have been worse.
“Junior year is when recruiting starts to get really big,” Oakes said. “You have to be on your top ‘A’ game with school and rowing. I thought when I broke my wrist no colleges were going to want me. I felt like my rowing career was over. It sounds so silly looking back on it. I probably didn’t need to freak out about it, but in the moment I thought all the work I had done was going to waste.
“I wasn’t able to row with the cast on, so I went to a spin class twice a day to maintain my cardio. I did exercises to improve my core strength. I tried to do everything I could to make sure I stayed as fit as possible without actually erging or getting in a boat.
“It was a difficult period to go through. Something went wrong. I thought that if I could cope with this now, when I get to college I can manage the bigger things in life a lot better.”
(Part Two next week will detail how Oakes recovered from this adversity to become a member of the rowing team at Stanford University.)
