Charlotte Barrett has still never raced in a boat. Never pulled an oar. Never heard a coxswain bark, “Catch together!”
But this fall she’ll learn to do all that as a member of the freshman class of the Eastern Michigan Eagles women’s crew, where she’s earned a Division I athletic scholarship to row.
The daughter of former University of Wisconsin defensive lineman (and current Dane County Sheriff) Kalvin Barrett, Charlotte said in an interview this week that she had “big shoes to fill,” athletically speaking.
“I did pretty much every (sport) I possibly could as a kid growing up… from hockey all the way to T-ball,” she said, including soccer, which she started at about 4 years old. That’s the sport that stuck.
“I just clicked with it, and I didn’t want to ever stop playing it,” she said. She moved from the Sun Prairie Soccer Club to Wisconsin Rush and, when she and her parents decided she wanted to try and catch the attention of college recruiters, the Madison 56ers for most of her high school years.
She did catch some attention; however, the schools that gave her the best offers to play soccer didn’t have the kind of biology program she wanted, as she hopes to enter a career in anesthesiology.
“I had talked to some smaller schools. I talked to a couple bigger schools… but I didn’t want to change the rest of my life for four years of soccer,” she said.
Then Eastern Michigan reached out, but not about soccer.
“Eastern Michigan reached out through email. They’re like, ‘We saw your soccer highlight tape and you look athletic. What would you think about rowing?’” she recalled. “And at first I thought it was a joke.”
It was no joke, and it wasn’t specifically her skill on the field that caught the coaches’ eye, said EMU head rowing coach Kemp Savage.
“It was through her soccer profile on NCSA, which is a recruiting website,” he said. “With rowing being a sport that you can transition to in college and be a top tier athlete, we search more than just the rowing recruiting list. Charlotte showed up as a good, solid athlete.”
Savage said rowing can often recruit from other sports because the main attribute one needs is endurance, as well as dedication.
“Her high level of playing soccer gives us a good idea of her ability to train and her fitness level,” he said. “(Rowing) is really a fitness sport. It’s a repetitive sport, and you really don’t have to play defense. It’s all offense and just how fast you can go. So a lot of it comes down to just that fitness and her sporting background, her long term dedication to a sport. And soccer being a kind of an aerobic based ball sport, it really sets her up nicely to be a rower.”
A campus visit sealed the deal for Barrett.
“I knew pretty much by the end of that first day of my visit that I was committing,” she said. “I actually texted my mom, ‘This is home. This is where I want to go.’”
She was especially impressed with the level of academic support she’d get.
“I mean, it was completely, fully academically supported with a side of rowing,” she said.
Once she committed, the instructions were clear: just get in shape.
“The first thing [the coaches] told me is… they did not want me on a rowing machine. They don’t want me picking up any bad habits that are going to be hard to break when I get there,” she said. They did give her an ambitious fitness regimen, though.
A shadow of doubt crossed her mind when it became clear that she’d need knee surgery, which she just had last week.
“Everything going through an athlete’s mind is, ‘Are they still going to want me?’ And they said, ‘We are going to support you no matter what,’” Barrett said. “They already have appointments scheduled for me with their physical therapist before I even get to school.”
Despite changing her focus for college, she’s not leaving soccer behind entirely, hoping to get acclimated to college and then find opportunities to coach youth players.
“It was my whole life, and it’s very weird that I’m just gonna cut it out,” she said. “I definitely want to keep it a part of my life, just in a different way.”
Savage, the EMU rowing coach, said athletes new to rowing are in for a treat.
“I think the first time you really have that really good stroke, that’s like the really good (realization) that this is amazing, because you’re just sitting on water and you’re gliding above it on your own effort. It’s a very different feeling than anything else, except maybe flying,” he said. “So I think that’ll be, like, the big, ‘oh yeah, this is this is different. This is awesome.’ When you get eight people that are perfectly tuned and just letting the boat go and run out at speed … there’s no comparable feeling.”
On the flip side, he said, “I think her first four-by-two-k workout,” – that is, rowing a full two kilometer race four times in one session – “will probably be a little rough. That tends to be rough on everybody.”
Barrett’s mom already has big dreams for her daughter’s new sport.
“My mom always jokes, ‘Charlotte, you can go to the Olympics with rowing,’” she said “I’m like, ‘Okay, well, let me get in the boat first before we start talking about the Olympics.’”
But nothing is out of the question, including competing to get to the top of the Mid Atlantic Conference, which EMU’s rowing team is just joining this year, now that the conference now has enough teams to compete.
“As far as they can take me, I’ll go. And as far as I can go, I’ll take myself,” she said.
