Hi, I’m currently an sophomore high school girls coxswain and this question doesn’t really have to do with coxing or rowing, but I hope you can help me out. Both the junior and senior classes of my crew are very small, two people each. However, the sophomore class is quite big, around 15. Now that the spring season is starting only about 5 novices have joined so our coach, who was a rower back when the varsity team had 90 girls total, is mad at us and constantly pressing us to go out and recruit. Our school has about 600 people per grade so it shouldn’t seem too hard but I am not very good at talking to new people so I have a hard time going up to people to recruit. I am wondering if you have any tips on how to recruit and things to say to the person to get them interested in the sport.
Check out the post linked below. It’s mainly geared towards recruiting coxswains to your team (and what not to do) but there’s some stuff in there that’s applicable to recruiting in general.
Related: How to recruit coxswains
Instead of talking to individual people (which will never not be awkward) try reaching out to groups instead, like National Honor Society (pretty sure 3/4 of my team was in NHS), Model UN, Key Club, Student Council, etc. If your school has a marching band (particularly a competitive one), that’d be another good group to talk to. I think during my freshman and sophomore year at least half of us (which was like, 50ish people) were on the crew team too since it was a good way to stay in shape between when we finished in November and started again in July.
That’s obviously not a comprehensive list but it’s a good starting point if you think about the type of people that rowing typically attracts – driven, competitive, dedicated, etc. See if you can make a quick 5 minute pitch at the start of their next meeting and say that the team is looking for people who’d be interested in joining, this is when/where practice is, follow us on social media to get an idea for what the team is like, and if you have any questions talk to [the team captain(s), the seniors, or whoever else you designate]. You don’t have to give a ton of details right off the bat so just give them the pertinent information and then you can answer the more specific questions later. Another thing is to see if you can occupy a small part of the chalkboard in some of the classrooms. We did this my senior year and asked our AP/Honors teachers if they’d mind us writing something and leaving it there for a week or so and they were all pretty cool with it. I don’t remember what we wrote but it was probably something really simple (“WANNA ROW? 3PM. LIBRARY. SNACKS.”) written in a delightfully artsy design that only a bunch of 17 year old girls given colored chalk and free reign over the chalkboard could design.
Another great way to get new people is to talk to fall/winter athletes who aren’t doing a spring sport. We had a lot of swimmers, basketball players, volleyball players, cross-country runners, and soccer players on our team, in addition to several football players – wide receivers, running backs, safeties, and kickers specifically. These were always some of the best people on the team (physically and mentally) because they already had that competitive mindset that can be really hard to teach new athletes. If you’re trying to get walk-ons in the fall you can also have your coach talk to the coaches of the other fall teams and see if they can get a list of the kids that were cut that might have the potential (aka athletic ability) to excel at another sport. Just because they didn’t make the soccer team doesn’t mean they wouldn’t make a good rower!