The Rowing News Interview: Jesse Foglia

USRowing named Jesse Foglia head coach of the USRowing Training Center-Princeton at the end of 2022 after multiple stints as a National Team coach on the U19 and U23 levels. He’s responsible for the U.S. women’s Olympic eight and straight four that will race in Europe at a World Rowing Cup before the Paris Olympic regatta, July 27 to Aug. 4.

Foglia has coached at Fox Chapel High School, Three Rivers Rowing Association, Bates College, Harvard University, and the U.S. U19 and U23 National Teams. Rowing News sat down with him at the end of Olympic selection camp in Sarasota, Fla., just as the 12 rowers and one coxswain who will make up the eight and four for Paris were selected.

Rowing News: You’ve been a junior coach and a collegiate coach. Now you’re an Olympic coach.

The last three weeks of this process were three of the most challenging emotionally that I’ve ever dealt with in coaching. I love my job. I love the athletes I work with, whether they’re based in Princeton [USRowing’s main training center] or a group we brought in from outside. My job is to create a process that eliminates individuals from the thing for which they’ve been working for eight or nine years. I don’t take that lightly.

To sit down in front of someone and tell them that that path has ended for now is really challenging. At the junior level, when you’re cutting kids, you can always point them to the next level, like U23, or you can say, “You can come back; you have [remaining] eligibility.” And at the college level, you take someone from the varsity and put them in the JV.

I wish we could send two boats to the Olympics in each event. And the reality is that they’d probably do reasonably well with the group that we have right now. There was nothing easy about getting to the point we are now—the human and the physical piece of recognizing that for some people this is the closing of a door for something they’ve worked incredibly hard for.

Rowing News: What was your favorite boat in your coaching career?

There were two that I remember definitively, and it’s kind of funny because it’s the same people who make it up, my first two international campaigns at the under-19 level.

The first international campaign I did was in 2015, which was the Olympic test event for Rio. That group was Pieter Quinton, who is now in the men’s eight, Michael Cuellar, who is no longer rowing, Paul Turina, who went on to Washington, and Piers Deeth-Stehlin, who rowed at Harvard. That was the first international campaign I ever did.

Then the next year, I coached the four again, which was in Rotterdam. They got bronze in a really tight race with the Serbians—it was blisteringly fast.

I have special memories of the women’s four from this past summer. They ended a solid season with a fantastic race at the World Cup. [The U.S. crew of Molly Bruggeman, Kelsey Reelick, Madeleine Wanamaker, and Claire Collins won World Rowing Cup II in Varese, Italy.]

I have a long track record of silver medals—something like seven in a row in international racing. I know it was a World Cup, but it was the first time we’d won. That was a pretty special moment. It felt like, “We’re doing the right stuff; we’re on the right path.”

I spent the first 10 years of my coaching career trying to figure out if I could do it, if I could find a way to be a coach. I haven’t had the most traditional path. I wasn’t a collegiate rower, and my high-school rowing career was positive but mediocre.

I spent a lot of time coaching high school and then club and got my first job at Division 3 when Peter Steenstra at Bates gave me a shot. He had no real reason to give me that job. But he paid me $8,000 a year and gave me a free place to sleep, and I moved to Maine. That was a big turning point

Financially, I was like, “I can’t live on this forever, but if he’s willing to give me a shot, maybe I can make this more professional.” I was always just trying to get the next job, and now here I am.

Rowing News: Would you recommend it to a 23-year-old?

Absolutely. I wouldn’t change a thing.

Rowing News: Can you see yourself overseas someday? Coaching somewhere else?

I don’t think so. I love the U.S. of A. I have family here. There would have to be something incredibly lucrative or appealing about going somewhere else. I have a lot of pride in having worked with all the levels—U19, U23, and now the seniors. It’s been bred into me—this idea that we have the athletes to be successful; we just have to continue to develop them. So I don’t see myself going anywhere any time soon.

Rowing News: What’s your general take on the crews?

It’s hard to comment specifically on individual crews at the moment because we haven’t gotten to the point where if you held a gun to my head and asked, “What’s the best eight?” or “What’s the best four?” I could say definitively. I feel confident that by the end of the process we had selected the best 12 athletes.

We’ve had some eights and fours that have shown strong international speed, but at the moment I can’t say “The four looks great” or “They need some work” or anything like that because we haven’t gotten to that point yet.

With selection camp wrapped up, these boats don’t have to go through Olympic trials. They don’t have to qualify; they made it on the strength of their World Championship performance last year. So we’re going to give them a week to disperse, to see friends, family, loved ones, re-center themselves, though they’ll still have some training to do.

The last 12 weeks have been a significant push physically and emotionally. We’ve been on the road for a good chunk of that—in Colorado Springs, here in Florida preparing for winter speed order, a two-week break, then selection.

So I want to give them a chance to come down from that emotionally and re-ground themselves, and then we’ll meet at the training center in Princeton. From there, we’ll probably spend about three or four weeks returning to what I would call basic training, a lot of lower intensity, some AT [anaerobic threshold] work, but a step back from the heavy work of selection.

At that point, we’ll begin to investigate what our options and opportunities are more vigorously: With these 12, how can we make the most competitive boats possible?

Rowing News: And you have that luxury because of last year’s success?

Yes, we have that luxury because we have 12 really good people. You saw the results from the speed order. It was pretty frickin’ competitive on all levels.

Rowing News: What are your expectations for the racing in Europe this summer before the Olympics?

The expectation always is to go and have a race that is indicative of what you feel like you’ve shown on a day-to-day basis in training. We’re going to use it as an opportunity to learn. From speaking to athletes who came out of the last cycle, when we were in a global pandemic, I know they felt impacted by not having the chance to race before the Olympics.

So we’ll probably send everybody down the track twice, double up some athletes in different events. To sit on the start line, to hear other nations called, the chance to go down 2,000 meters—that’s valuable experience regardless of boat class and what seat you’re sitting in.

Coming out of that, it gives us a starting point of “We’re in the conversation” or “We still have eight weeks to make some significant changes and find more speed” or “We’re in a good spot.”

Now we just have to make sure we don’t mess it up.

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