For ten intense weeks this spring, dozens of Norwich teenagers and their parents will wake up on weekday mornings in the pitch dark. They will drive down a deserted Main Street and cross the Connecticut River, making a sharp left turn after the Ledyard Bridge into a parking lot. By 4:45 a.m., at its far end, in front of Dartmouth College’s Fuller Boathouse, preparations for a Hanover High School rowing team practice will already be in full swing.

On a typical morning, the program’s six coaches will confer with assistant coaches, myself included, about the day’s planned workout. All of us, bundled in heavy one-piece suits against the cold, will be looking out for the nine students assigned to each boat—eight who row and one, the coxswain, who steers and motivates the rest of the crew.

Meanwhile, down at the docks, a rotating team of volunteer “motor moms and dads” will be readying coaches’ motorboats. By the light of headlamps, they will fill gas tanks, start motors and bail water so that practice can start on time. By 5:15 a.m. as many as 14 long, narrow crew boats will be on their way, cutting through the dark, still water of the Connecticut.

“We all share a passion,” said Julie Stevenson, a Norwich resident who teaches social studies at Hanover High School and has been the head coach of the school’s rowing team since 2000. “It is 10 weeks of burning the candle at both ends, but it is totally exciting.”

Parents play key roles, Stevenson said, and not just dockside. They help their sons and daughters seek donations of support from neighbors and friends during the team’s annual “rowathon” fundraiser. The indoor rowing event, scheduled this year for March 7, provides the funds needed to purchase equipment. An eight-person shell can cost upwards of $26,000, a set of oars $2,000, for example, large expenses that the co-ed rowing team’s portion of the high school athletic budget does not cover.

A half dozen parents organize the others to provide food and drinks for the team during six away regatta races. They also orchestrate a potluck celebration to cap off the season for all the teams attending the Hanover invitational regatta at the end of May.

Peter Mills of Norwich, whose son Logan is rowing this year as a junior, likes to man the barbecue at these events and he has a Brinkman grill and stacks of coolers on his front porch to prove it. “It’s like having a big party every weekend for a bunch of kids,” he said. “It’s a big production. But it has been fun.”

Also, in 2008, former and current rowing parents banded together to form Friends of Hanover Crew. The organization purchased Fullington Farm, a property along the Connecticut River in Hanover, from Dartmouth College with the intent of building a boathouse. Requests for permits to build the facility and a rowing dock next to the public boat launch at Wilson’s Landing are now before Hanover planning and zoning boards.

Spring 2010 marks the rowing program’s tenth anniversary as a varsity sport at Hanover High, which still is the only public school in either Vermont or New Hampshire that offers rowing at that level. (Manchester Central High School and Concord High School, both in New Hampshire, are represented by club teams.)

With more than 120 participants in recent years, including both boys and girls, rowing is by far the school’s most popular sport, according to the Hanover High athletic office. And the roster for this spring suggest that this popularity will continue. More than 60 first-year novice rowers have signed up for the early morning routine, more than ever before.

Keegan Dufty, a senior at Hanover from Norwich and one of this year’s team captains, often finds himself talking fellow students into going out for rowing. “Most people don’t go into it excited about the early mornings. I think most people have to be talked into trying it.”

“It definitely means no sleep ever,” agreed junior Emma Kaufman, also from Norwich and a coxswain for the girls varsity crews.

Once students try it, though, many feel like Logan Mills, Peter’s son, who says he has never been fond of getting up early, but has learned to love the morning practices.

“You get to school, take a shower, have a second breakfast. You feel like you have already done something,” said Logan Mills. “You see the sun rise. It’s definitely a nice way to get up in the morning.”

An Incredible Amount of Momentum

The Hanover High School crew team began as a club in the fall of 1997. At the start of the first season, the 50 girls who participated spent practices running and swimming because the club did not own any boats, said Peter Kermond of Hanover, who coached during the first year and now coaches the boys varsity boats. They purchased two boats with the help of a loan from parents. He borrowed a motor boat from another parent and used a traffic cone for a bullhorn.

“We were so bare bones,” said Kermond. “There was an incredible amount of momentum. It was so novel and so well received.”

The program succeeded in the early years because of the enthusiasm and commitment of a core group of girls and their parents, Kermond said. But two other men with ties to Norwich were also instrumental in its founding.

The first was Dick Grossman, a crew coach at Dartmouth College for 30 years, who started the Dartmouth summer rowing program in 1976 to teach community members how to row. Several of the girls who helped organize the Hanover team were first exposed to rowing through the multi-week program. As importantly, in 1997, Grossman—who retired from Dartmouth in 2005—helped Kermond and the team approach the college administration to gain permission to use the Dartmouth dock and other facilities during the early morning hours. Over the coming years, both his daughter and son became members of the team.

The second was Uwe Bagnato, the principal of Hanover High School when the crew team formed through 2002. He supported the fledgling club and backed its bid to become a varsity sport in 2000.

“It was clear that this was no halfhearted or fleeting interest,” said Bagnato, who has returned to Norwich after working for an international school in New Delhi, India. “This was a group of dedicated rowers.”

The growth of rowing at Hanover High is not an isolated occurrence, said Grossman. High school programs, particularly for girls, have blossomed across the country. During the 1990s, “there was a major move happening in high school rowing (across the country),” said Kermond. “There were more and more college opportunities.”

By then, college women’s rowing had become a major beneficiary of the requirements of Title IX, part of a 1972 education law that requires colleges receiving federal funding to offer women an equal opportunity to participate in sports. The law has been interpreted to mean that colleges must offer female athletic teams equal athletic scholarship dollars as men’s teams and also spend equally on equipment, supplies and facilities. Women’s rowing, with high athlete numbers and expensive equipment, is used by many colleges to offset spending on their football team.

Hanover is unusual one way because most high schools built programs from a base of young rowers already developed by area community rowing clubs. That was not the case in the Upper Valley, at least at first.

The Dresden Rowing Club was founded in 1999, and received permission from Dartmouth to row out of the Fuller Boathouse. Now called the Upper Valley Rowing Foundation (UVRF), it has grown in strength and numbers alongside the high school program. Each group helps the other with equipment and coaching expertise. In the summer and fall, UVRF offers its own early morning classes and programs, also with the aid of committed coaches and volunteers.

A Really Strong Year

As Coach Stevenson prepared for another spring crew season last month, she was looking forward to the company of the other coaches, who this year hail from Thetford and Plainfield and Lyme, New Hampshire, as well as from Norwich and Hanover. Several have been coaching together for almost a decade. She also enjoys spending time with students who are enthusiastic about a sport that she loves.

“People talk about teenagers being complainers,” said Stevenson, but that has not been her experience at all with the students who participate in crew. “They are so hardworking, so dedicated.”

The Hanover rowing team’s strength can be seen in their performance in state and regional regattas in recent years. Its boats are increasingly competitive with their main private school competitors in New Hampshire, including St. Paul’s, Philips Exeter and Andover. This is especially true of the girl’s varsity boats, one of which took second place at last year’s New England Interscholastic Regatta in Worcester, Mass. They expect good results this year as well.

“We didn’t lose that many seniors,” said coxswain Emma Kaufman. “I think we are going to have a really strong year.”

Yet students also said that rowing for them is not primarily about bringing home medals. They appreciate the pleasure of physical activity and the natural beauty of mornings on the Connecticut, and most of all the relationships they build with each other over the course of their short season.

“It’s the team and camaraderie,” said Keegan Dufty. “We’ve all become pretty close friends.

Kristen Fountain is an avid rower who lives in Norwich. She is an assistant coach for the Hanover High School novice girls boats this spring.