Hey. I’m a 15 year old rower from Australia. There’s 2 girl’s crews in my year, 9/10s. The A crew recently got one of their friends to cox them, but she’s an average weight and height. I’m in the B crew, which is constantly changing rowers, the cox and seat order. I’m currently 148cm (4’10”) and I weigh 40kg (88 lbs). Two of the girls in A crew and myself think that I’m a good cox and I should be coxing A crew, but I never get the chance to cox them or any other crews anymore. What should I do?

Wow, you’re smaller than me and you row? That’s crazy (and impressive…).

Hmm. I assume you’ve talked to your coach about this? Not knowing anything about your skills on the water, my guess is that the coaches like what they see and want to keep an oar in your hands because despite being incredibly small for a rower, you’ve actually got some boat-moving ability. If you’re not getting injured from trying to keep up with your teammates and your coaches are happy with the girl that’s currently coxing the A boat, I can see why they wouldn’t want to mess around with the current dynamic. I’d say that, for now, just stick to rowing.

Quick PSA for everyone too: there’s a very, veeerrry fine line that you risk crossing when you tell someone who isn’t your current coxswain (or isn’t a coxswain at all) that they should be coxing the top boat, they’d make a great coxswain, etc. because even if it’s an offhand comment, you’re going to put ideas in their head that might be completely unfounded and/or implausible. Granted yes, there are always exceptions and a lot of them have been posted on here but if you’re a rower and a) aren’t injured in any way, b) have never coxed or have coxed very little (3 months consistently or less), or c) aren’t of coxing size (obviously important) … just don’t entertain the thought. What ends up happening is you start thinking “Oh, I could probably do this better than that coxswain. Pffft, I could call a power 10 better than that. Hmm, looks like she’s struggling with how to dock, no worries I’ll just tell bow four what they need to do because I could probably explain it better than her.” Don’t be that person. Seriously. It’s rude and annoying and can really mess with a coxswain’s head and the chemistry of a crew.

If you think you have the potential to be a good coxswain but aren’t currently one, first determine if switching to coxing is realistic (more often than not it isn’t but again, exceptions exist) and then if you determine it is, talk to your coach about it. They’ll either say “you know what, we actually do need another coxswain, why don’t we try you out in a boat next week” or “we have all the coxswains we need right now, I’d rather see you stay in the boat”. Other times they’ll just flat out say no and unless you’ve got a really, REALLY good reason not to, you should just accept it and stick with what you’re currently doing. Just like with everything else out there, “no” is not code for “convince me”,  “incessantly bug me about it until I cave and say yes”, or “search for loopholes so you can do what you want anyways”. You have to trust the fact that your coach does know more than you do and most of the time it’s unlikely that they’re just flippantly ignoring your request.