Sometimes we stumble upon our destiny. When Charlie Lebens, 2014 Whitfield School graduate, was invited by a friend to attend practice for the St. Louis Rowing Club’s novice team as a freshman, he never expected that he’d wrap up his high school career with an invitation to row for Dartmouth College.
St. Louis Rowing Club brings teens together from all around St. Louis, Lebens says. “We all came to rowing because we didn’t necessarily fit into other sports or programs at our schools,” he says. “It takes a special kind of friendship to be able to come to practice anywhere from three to six hours a day.”
Practices at Creve Coeur Lake occur year-round. “Even in the winter, we’re in the boathouse every day, pumping it out on the rowing machines, lifting weights and doing cross-training,” Lebens says. “It’s a full-body sport. You can’t get by training only one part of your body.”
All that practice paid off: Lebens won gold at the 2013 National Championships, and last year the team was undefeated the entire season. This last success Lebens jokingly attributes to the support of mascot Gupperz, a beta fish who rides in the boat with the team.
At this year’s nationals, the team was only six-hundredths of a second away from qualifying for the grand finals. “What makes it a beautiful sport is it does come down to the last hundredth of a second,” Lebens says. “Even though we didn’t make it by that sixth hundredth of a second, we did beat Marin Rowing Association out of San Francisco, which has been renowned as the best club in America.”
Lebens marks his personal rowing progress by his races in Oak Ridge, Tenn. “We’ve rowed there every year since I started,” he says. “The first year we got almost dead last, the next year we came back and started winning medals, and the year after that we pulled off a national championship.”