Every week, a small group of Randolph High School students board a school bus for an hour-long ride to Fall River, bound for a pond most of their classmates will never see. There, they pull oars through the water at the Watuppa Rowing Center, building a sport from scratch in a landlocked town.
The program traces back to a book. As reported by The Boston Globe, Randolph High School librarian Susan Lane proposed Arshay Cooper's memoir, A Most Beautiful Thing: The True Story of America's First All-Black High School Rowing Team, for the district's summer reading list, and a committee approved it in 2023. Lane said some students could relate to Cooper's account of growing up on Chicago's West Side and finding peace through rowing, and she went on to invite him to speak at the school that same year.
Cooper, whose memoir tells the story of America's first all-Black high school rowing team, didn't just visit — he donated five new indoor rowing machines, funded a student field trip to the Head of the Charles Regatta, and partnered Randolph with a rowing school willing to teach its students for free. He described the Randolph students as talented but lacking access and opportunity, according to the Globe's reporting. By 2024, the rowing club had become an official school sport, Randolph's first recognized crew team.
A Five-Student Crew Finds Its Footing
The current roster is small but spans three grade levels: one freshman, one sophomore, and three juniors, rowing together under their school coach. Freshman Antoine McKoy, 13, joined this year after sophomore Ethan Cohen recommended it to him; McKoy has said he enjoys being on the water and values what rowing has taught him about balance.
Cohen, 16, joined last year after previously running track and field. He's said the workouts were harder than he expected, but that meeting new people has become his favorite part of the sport — he now feels less nervous talking to people than he used to, and plans to stay with the club and recruit more friends.
On land, the students train with Lane, a former swim coach, practicing stretching, weight training, and rowing vocabulary at school, and working out twice a week outside of their on-water sessions. The water practices themselves happen at the Watuppa Rowing Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2018 on South Watuppa Pond with a mission to provide free rowing instruction to all youth in the Greater Fall River Area, according to RegattaCentral. The pond is the third-largest freshwater body in Massachusetts and now features a six-lane, fully buoyed two-kilometer racecourse.
Why a Foundation Built Around One Memoir Matters Nationally
Jeffrey Soares, director at the Watuppa Rowing Center, has said it's difficult to get schools to adopt a brand-new sport at all, and he praised Randolph for building a rowing program in a landlocked town. Soares has also coached from a separate boat on the pond while students from surrounding schools rowed together in an eight-person shell.
The funding behind Randolph's crew team comes from the A Most Beautiful Thing Inclusion Fund, which Cooper started to make rowing more accessible nationwide. The fund has generated more than $3.4 million in funding and supports 19 youth rowing programs in historically underrepresented communities, per row2k. The fund provides annual $25,000 grants per program along with “I Rise” stipends set aside specifically to pay and support rowing coaches of color. Equipment manufacturers Concept2 and Hudson Boat Works have also donated roughly $300,000 in gear — including 50 indoor ergs, 60 oars, and 10 racing double shells — to equip early partner programs, according to The Thoughtful Rower.
Jennifer Ceolinski, program manager at the fund, has said students in programs like Randolph's are forming their own rowing family, and that many are seeing people like themselves in the sport for the first time.
Confronting a National Diversity Gap
The sport's lack of diversity is stark: about 77% of female rowers identify as White and just 2% as Black.
Only five Black rowers have ever represented the United States in Olympic rowing. Aquil Abdullah became the first Black male rower to compete for Team USA at the 2004 Athens Games.
The documentary A Most Beautiful Thing chronicled Cooper's Chicago high school crew team.
For now, Randolph's five rowers keep making the hour-long trip to Fall River, training on a pond three towns away from home in a sport their school never offered before 2024. Whether the district can fund that bus ride permanently once foundation support winds down, or whether other landlocked South Shore schools will follow Randolph's lead, remains to be seen.
