Deerfield’s Winning Trifecta

In 2023, Deerfield Academy was the best rowing high school in America, with both the boys and girls varsity eights the top scholastic (non-club) finishers at the 2023 USRowing Youth National Championships (sixth and seventh, respectively, in the A final).

It was the first year student-athletes at the prestigious 227-year old school raced in eights instead of fours, and while success came immediately for Deerfield—both the girls and boys crews won the New England Interscholastic Rowing Association (NEIRA) varsity-eight championships and went on to race at Henley Royal Regatta—success did not come overnight.

It was years in the making, the result of a confluence of the three things behind every top rowing program: great athletes, great coaches, and great support.

Great Athletes

Coach Spencer Washburn downplays his role in the dominant year his boys crews had in 2023.

“We had the right group in place to make the switch.”

A measure of the fierce competitiveness of New England prep-school rowing is the fact that this spring Deerfield has been beaten across the line already by Salisbury School and Philips Academy (Andover), where Spencer and Deerfield’s girls coach Parker Washburn grew up and where their brother, Taylor, is the boys coach.

Their father, Peter Washburn, coached them at Andover, rowed at Syracuse with his two brothers, and also grew up at an elite boarding school—Delaware’s St. Andrew’s School—where his father, Davis Washburn, taught and coached rowing for 40 years.

“The strength of the team begins and ends with the students who choose to participate,” said Parker, giving credit for Deerfield’s historic 2023 season first and foremost to the athletes.

“We had some great leadership. The kids were exceptionally patient and when they had their opportunities they made the most of them.”

As a highly selective boarding school with a strong academic tradition dating to its founding in 1797, Deerfield Academy attracts high-achieving students exclusively. With an endowment of $791 million, the school is able to cover 100 percent of the financial need of everyone admitted.

“We’re rowing, but more broadly, the kids are looking to strive for excellence in all areas of school life,” Spencer said.

In recent years, an increasing number of incoming students are arriving at the western Massachusetts school on the Connecticut River with rowing experience—and high expectations.

“The first year I was here, maybe there were one or two kids who had done any rowing. And now there’s a pretty significant number,” Spencer said. “It injects a level of energy and experience into the program from day one. That’s been fun to see. It’s really different from 10 years ago.”

Great Coaches

Deerfield offered club rowing 40 years ago and got serious about varsity rowing with the hiring of accomplished coaches, including but not limited to the Washburns.

“Ten years ago when I got here, I had 28 boys on the roster,” Spencer said. “Last spring, I had 57.”

That kind of growth is great for the depth and impact of a rowing program on a student body, but the experience of athletes suffers if opportunities to race can’t be found for nine boats of rowers and coxswains in coxed fours.

“It got to the point over the past couple of springs where running a fours program with that many kids was a real challenge,” said Spencer.

Parker faced the same challenges with the girls the year before the switch to eights.

“The team was growing. There were 39 girls who wanted to row that year, and getting them on the water consistently and finding great opportunities for them against other fours programs was challenging.

“Certainly there was a lot of success in that season. But it didn’t feel great,” said Parker, that the girls starting out were having a different experience and opportunities to race than the more seasoned girls.

“Last year, we had 46 girls on the team. Providing a positive experience for everybody was challenging as well. We have great kids here. The students are committed to the team, committed to the sport, and committed to their development in a way that makes me feel fortunate.”

Deerfield Academy had a successful history as a fours program, including winning recent NEIRA and Youth National championships.

“I came to interview 11 years ago,” recalled Spencer. “The then head of school, Margarita Curtis, closed our conversation by saying, ‘I want to be the best high-school program in the country.’ That’s what I walked away with from the conversation: They’re invested in making this not just really good, which is what it was, but even better.

“I like to dig into my dad’s memories about what he had to do [as a boarding-school coach in the past], like drive the bus. We certainly get support in a way he never had.”

Spencer and his wife recruited Parker and his wife from another New England prep school. In addition to coaching rowing together, Spencer’s wife, Megan, and Parker’s wife, Liz, also teach in the science department together.

“As we got to know the school more, our professional priorities aligned really well,” Parker said. “I felt like there was going to be a lot of growth in my own teaching by moving here.

“In talking with Bob Howe, the athletic director, he had high aspirations for the girls team. There was growth happening on the girls side, but perhaps not to the same extent” as the boys, who won their last USRowing Youth National Championship in the coxed four in 2022, before switching to eights.

“It’s been fun,” said Spencer, “from both a working and family standpoint to have them on campus. I’ve got three boys and they’ve got little girls, and my boys love the fact that they have cousins who live right across campus.”

Great Support

When boys coach Spencer Washburn presented the proposal for the New England boarding school to switch to eights, there was good reason, considering the expense and likely headaches, to expect pushback from the administration. Instead, he found support.

The Deerfield CFO’s first question, Spencer recalled: “Is this what’s best for the students?”

“I laid out my thoughts and what we might want to do to get there, and they’ve done it.”

Deerfield is one of a few high schools to have moving-water indoor rowing tanks, part of a new athletic complex that includes an ice hockey rink, indoor track, and turf field.

“They went through and asked all the coaches, ‘What do you want? You guys want an erg room, right?’ I said, ‘No, we can put ergs anywhere,’” Spencer said. What the rowing program wanted, and got, were tanks.

“It just pops as a facility to walk through that place. We’ve got kids in there taking their first strokes to kids who are heading off to college, and it’s useful to all of them. It’s been a great piece of equipment to have at our disposal.”

Deerfield goes to Florida to train in the second week of its two-week spring break, which gets the New England school on the water—something the weather kept them from doing every day when they got back this year.

Deerfield also benefits from extraordinary support from parents.

“Every year, we have a group of parents who ask, ‘How can we support this program? How can we support the experience of our students?’” said Spencer. Despite having the children of Olympians and other accomplished rowing parents on the team, the Deerfield coaches haven’t experienced the kind of meddling common in youth sports today.

“The parents have been exceptionally supportive, not just of the team, but of their children in terms of having a good perspective on what’s important,” Parker said.

Even though Deerfield is a prep school, as in preparing students for college, Parker says there’s no emphasis on college recruitment.

“If they’re interested in rowing in college, I’m happy for them to engage in the recruitment process. But what I tell the students is, I’m here to support them, but it’s their process to own. Conversations are about what schools—not necessarily what rowing programs—but what schools are you most interested in.”

Having successfully transitioned to eights rowing in the spring, is sculling in the fall next for Deerfield?

“That’s actually a conversation that I’ve begun with our director,” said Spencer. “We don’t want kids rowing from September to June. We feel great about the fact that our kids are not rowing year-round, that they are involved meaningfully in other things on campus, whether it be other sports or theater or student government.

“But we also look at the rowing landscape, and sculling and small-boat rowing are becoming an important part of both preparation for college and becoming a better, more complete rower.”

For Parker Washburn, who rowed at Andover, Harvard, and Craftbury’s Green Racing Project, Deerfield is proving to be a complete place already.

“I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to row under some great coaches and with some great teammates. I feel like this is another one of those places where we strive for excellence not only in rowing but in everything really.”

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