More Than Rowing: Kent School Boat Club, The First 100 Years

Over the past 100 years the boys and girls rowing teams of the Kent School Boat Club of Kent School in Connecticut have racked up a record only the New York Yankees could envy: 117 consecutive winning seasons (72 boys, 45 girls), 37 combined New England championships since 1951, 14 undefeated crews, and 9 national championships for an astounding 80% winning percentage. The first American high school to compete in the prestigious Henley Royal Regatta in England, it has won at Henley six times. The program has produced 55 national team members and coaches, 9 world champions and 2 Olympic gold medalists. More than 100 of its graduates have gone on to coach at every level of the sport, and Kent’s impact on the sport itself has been notably disproportionate to the school’s modest size. As one former Kent coach put it, “Kent Crew was and is, in both physical and metaphysical form, a space apart…its boathouse conveyed an unavoidable sense that anyone using it on any given afternoon was part of something different, a part of, but yet beyond, the School.” In this two-volume work, noted rowing historian Peter Davis Mallory provides a thorough, year-by-year account of a 100-year tradition that began in 1922 and shows no signs of abating as it enters its next century.