Rowing

ROWING

I came to the University of Notre Dame not knowing what to expect. I left the comfort of my family, friends, and hometown to come to a whole new world just waiting for me to explore. During the first few weeks of the semester, I was on the lookout for potential groups of people that might share my interests. Within the first month, I had found myself a special group of people to share a common interest or passion: Notre Dame's Women Rowing Team. This group exhibits four attributes that any other group should have: membership, interaction, goals, and norms.

Since women's rowing is a varsity sport, gaining membership to this elite group of girls was not very easy even though it is probably the only sport that accepts people who walk on with little or no experience. Girls who walked on to the team, like myself, had to go through a month of try-outs where our ability to learn quickly, persevere, and bring intensity were tested. At the end of try-out season, the small group of girls that was left realized that this sport was not for the faint of heart. Rowing was the real deal. Row hard, row like a champion or go home because "giving-up" was banished from our vocabulary. As we, the try-outs that were left, were finalized as new rowers, we were beginning to be acknowledged by the older girls. They finally said hi to us on campus, welcomed us with a team meeting, and let us sit at the same table in the dining halls. We received new rowing gear, clothes, that further recognize us as being part of the team. Students on campus, dorm mates, and classmates also began to recognize us as athletes and members of the rowing team because of the shirts that we wore.

Going to practice everyday, we are forced to face each other on a daily basis. Our interaction with teammates and students outside the team are influenced by the amount of time we spend with each other. We begin to build a special bond with each other after each day. We see each other as teammates, friends, people whom we can relate to. We get to know more about our teammates when we share personal stories about losses, achievements, frustrations, funny occurrences, and basically our lives during practice. The bond that we have built is a social cohesion where we genuinely like one another, share the same interest, and have similar characteristics. Interaction through a team also provides us with a wider network. We introduce our teammates to our friends and our teammates introduce us to their friends and in turn we are interacting with not just are teammates but also people connected to them.

Every group must have goals, individuals have goals as well that can complement or conflict with group goals.. Our overall team goal, varsity and novice rowers, is to win the Big East championship in the spring. In order to win the Big East, everyone must row their part because we are all interdependent on each other in the boats. Individual goals may include: strengthening the body, building endurance, and mastering rowing techniques. Through our common team goal and similar individual goals, we build another special bond that is task cohesion. Task cohesion is strengthened when we have challenging practices where rowers have to row for a whole hour with one minute rests every fifteen or twenty minutes or when we have to get up at six o'clock in the morning