What differences are there between being a collegiate coxswain versus a coxswain for a high school level team? What would a typical practice session look like?
“Typical” depends on your program. How practices are run, what you do, etc. all differ between programs, sometimes even between boats on the same team. There are big differences between Division 1 schools (where I was) and Division 3 schools too. Your best bet is to talk to the coaches of the schools you’re looking at and ask them what a typical practice entails.
In general though, you’ll probably have somewhere between 7-10 water practices a week and a team lift 1-2x a week. Most teams practice in the morning (usually somewhere between 6-8:30am) every day with the occasional afternoon/evening row (usually between 5-7ish), with the team lifts happening during that same block on the days they’re not on the water. Some teams only practice in the morning, some teams only practice in the afternoon/evenings, some teams have the rowers do weights on their own instead of all at once, etc. It varies.
Practices usually consist of a warmup followed by some drills (sometimes the drills are the warmup) and then either some AT pieces or several miles of steady state. There were also some days where we would do nothing BUT drills or just a warm up and steady state. There are a lot of factors that go into deciding what you do during a practice (the two biggest being the weather and how many people you have = what boats you can take out), so most coaches have a general idea of what they’d like to do but that’s not always what actually ends up happening. Usually the further out they have something planned, the more likely it is to change (i.e. if you get your training schedule for the year in August, what’s on the calendar for April might not be exactly what you end up doing, though it’ll usually be close).
As far as coxing specifically in college vs. high school, I don’t think there are any real differences because you’ve still gotta do all the same stuff. The only difference I can think of is that you’re really expected to be at that next level. The coaches expect you to be more responsible, be more on top of your coxing game, etc. They really anticipate not having to worry about you when you’re on the water too, whereas in high school, your coaches are always terrified you’re gonna hit something or break something or whatever. Basically though college rowing vs. high school rowing is the same as college vs. high school in general – there’s more work involved, it takes up way more time, and for most people it’s way more fun.
I know this is a three year old post at this point, but I feel like I should add my input here anyway. I cox for one of the perennial club “powerhouses” in the country (e.g. teams like Michigan, Delaware, GVSU, Purdue, UVA, Ohio State, Drexel, Bucknell, etc. come to mind) and was a cox for four years in high school. For us as a club team, we practice in the afternoon 5 days a week and on Saturday mornings. Usually it consists of AT days, UT (steady state/ technical) days, and one VO2 day. The number of AT vs. UT days changes depending on if it’s fall or spring and depending on what the guys in the boat feel needs the most work based on the last race. Sometimes the focus is on just getting meters in with a particular lineup, sometimes it’s on getting our base rate up higher, sometimes it’s just working on starts. In the winter, we add two lifting sessions to this during our practices. During our final exam week in the fall, we usually don’t have practice, but in the spring, each boat sets their own practice schedule around everyone’s exams and we usually end up having 6 practices in total with a mix of single day practice and two-a-days (depending on everyone’s exam times).