Nebraskaland

hen Kevin Fierro came to the University of Nebraska – Lincoln in the fall of 2020, he knew little about rowing, much less that the school had a club crew team. "I'd only seen those types of boats maybe twice in my life on TV," said Fierro, a graduate of Grand Island High School, who like many Americans, only see the sport every four years when the Olympics roll around. This fall, Fierro will start his third year on the club team, which spends evenings rowing on Pawnee State Recreation Area from ice-out in March through early November, traveling to regattas around the Midwest in the spring and fall, and countless hours on rowing machines in the club's boat house on campus and competing in inland races during winter. These are not, after all, your typical rowboats. He is one of many who have hit the water to Row Big Red. Let's Row In 1970, when Allen Maybee of Scottsbluff fi rst started recruiting members for UNL's rowing team, he didn't even have an oar, much less a boat. He promised the prospects he would by the time the ice went off the lakes the following spring. He sent letters to 54 rowing organizations asking if they had equipment to spare and spent the winter driving around the eastern U.S., picking up gear that was donated or off ered for sale. Then, in the spring of 1971, 40 crewmen who had never rowed a shell put on an exhibition at Capital Beach in Lincoln. A women's team was formed in 1973. For the fi rst 50 years, the team practiced at Branched Oak State Recreation Area. Equipment was stored in Mead and transported to the lake each practice until Maybee appropriated an unused maintenance building on campus for its boat house and, somehow, managed to not get evicted when offi cials found out. They continue to use that building today. Nebraska's team was competitive, at one point rolling off six straight Big Eight championships in the 1970s. They regularly competed in the Head of the Charles, one of the world's largest and most prestigious regattas, in the Boston area. There, they competed against the likes of Harvard and Yale, who held the fi rst intercollegiate competition of any kind when their crew teams faced off in 1852. A few team members kept rowing beyond college, competing on a national and international scale. Lisa Rohde, a farm girl from Hubbard, won a silver medal in rowing in the 1984 Olympics. George Pagano and Caitlin Miller rowed across the Atlantic Ocean in 2015. Still Rowing In 2021, the club moved its practices to Pawnee State Recreation Area, where, in partnership with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, they leased half of the renovated marina building, where they trained on rowing machines and stored equipment. Outside, there is a boat pen where the vessels are stored and new docks. Membership in the club last school year was about 20 students, well below what was in decades past, but double what it was the year before. W The crew team powers an eight-person sweep boat across Pawnee Lake.

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