At the beginning of this summer, senior Jeff Lindy was planning to take a little break from crew. As the varsity men's coxswain for the past three years, Lindy had dedicated six straight semesters to the grueling sport that he loved but was anticipating a relaxing summer in Boston. As fate would have it though, the doors of opportunity opened over and over again for the coxswain, and he returned to Boston with a silver medal from the World Championship race in Croatia.
During the spring, Lindy tried out for the Nations Cup squad, a championship boat for rowers under the age of 23, but was disappointed when he heard no reply from the coach. Assuming he was not going to be rowing during the summer, Lindy moved into a Medford apartment and began a summer job. However, it took less than two weeks before Lindy's luck began to change.
"The second week of my job, I got an e-mail at about 2:45 p.m. saying that I should get on over to Ithaca to try out, that they'd expect me at practice the next afternoon," Lindy remembered. "So, by 3:30, I'd quit my job, started packing my car up, blasted off on the six-hour drive to Ithaca."
Giving up his relaxing summer in Boston, Lindy had no regrets about moving on to pursue his dream of practicing with the best rowers and coxswains in the country. The daily double sessions were a change from the typical Tufts' crew practices, and Lindy never quite found his groove.
"Ithaca was a lot of fun, but I wasn't really doing well," Lindy said. "I screwed up very frequently in practice, like it was my job. So, after a month of trying out, I wasn't surprised that I was cut."
A door may have slammed in Lindy's face, but it did not take long for another window to open for the perseverant coxswain.
"After I was cut, the coach came up to me and the other cox who'd been cut," Lindy said. "[He] said that they were shorthanded down in Princeton, which is where the men's national training center is for the senior national team. They were getting together a light eight for the World Championships, and they needed someone to steer it."
Without missing a second, Lindy hopped into car and began a late night road trip to New Jersey. Crashing on the floor of a lightweight rower for the first few nights, Lindy wasted no time getting in the middle of the action.
"At first, I was steering boats for the lightweights, which was a real pressure cooker," Lindy said. "The final stages of selection for the lightweight four, which is an Olympic boat, were going on. There were ten guys in final contention for just four plane tickets to Sydney, so the practices where I worked with them were intense."
After the rigorous tryouts, Lindy was given another dose of bad news: he had just missed the cut...again. Realizing that Lindy was an accomplished coxswain though, lightweight coach Joe Murtaugh invited him to stay and practice with the heavyweight boats, in the hopes that he might try out again next year.
"Since I'd already quit my job and crammed all my worldly belongings into the back of my car, I figured, 'Why not?' There wasn't really much to go back to in Boston," Lindy said.
With the pressure off, Lindy was more relaxed and simply enjoyed his time coxing the elite heavyweight rowers. As time went on though, he noticed he was at the helm of the heavyweight four boat on a regular basis.
"After a week or two of practicing with the Four, Gavin White (the Four's coach), asked me, 'You doing anything in the next few weeks? Can you come to Europe with us," Lindy said. "It was sort of a stealth tryout, and I wasn't told about it. After being cut twice, I was in the right place at the right time."
In the blink of an eye, Lindy had just been offered the opportunity of his lifetime, and he took his new role quite seriously. During the last few practices in America, he perfected many of his skills, including steering in the straightest possible line, correcting for wind and water conditions, calling an aggressive race, and memorizing the game plan for the World Championship. The small-framed coxswain was also responsible for motivating a boat with 200-pound, 6'5" grown men.
"They've postponed an ordinary, adult life in order to have a chance to compete against the best rowers in the world. If the little college punk steering the shell screws up, they're just going to tear him apart," Lindy recalled.
On July 25, the team hopped on a plane and embarked on a plane to Zagreb, Croatia, where they were able to practice on the 2000-meter course for a week, before the finals on Aug. 6. Lindy's summer rowing saga could not have ended on a much higher note, as his boat captured the silver medal in the grand finals. Lindy was truly amazed at the whirlwind of events which left him with the most prized medal in his collection.
"Being on a national team, competing with the best, had been a far-out pipe dream of mine for the past four or five years," Lindy said. "Actually winning a silver medal at the World Championships, that's so far out I never even really thought about it."
Lindy returned to earth after this monumental accomplishment and finds himself in his senior year and back in the boat as captain of the men's crew team. Utilizing his summer experiences, Lindy hopes to jump start a team that which could be headed into a rebuilding year.
"I learned to be very critical of myself and my performance on the water, and I would like to carry with me at Tufts the standards that I had to live up to with the national squad," Lindy said.
