Teenager moves to top of her class

October 20, 2011|By John Powers, Globe Staff

SHINING THROUGH - The Charles River provides a glimmering backdrop as a… (David L. Ryan/Globe Staff )

It’s not as though she’ll have a lot of time to daydream at 35,000 feet on her way here from Southern California. This is, after all, a school day. “I’ll have to work on the plane,’’ Mackenzi Sherman figured. There’s a paper to write on “A Separate Peace’’. Some anatomy reading. And probably an SAT prep manual to peruse. Nobody else in the women’s championship singles field at this weekend’s 47th Head of the Charles regatta has to do homework, but nobody else still is in high school.

Sherman is 17, the youngest sculler among the 27 entrants by five years. Last autumn she rowed here with the Long Beach Rowing Association’s youth four. This time Sherman is going solo and because she rowed in the US quad at the August world junior championships in England, the rules say she has to compete in Saturday’s elite event here.

That means that Sherman will be paddling in the fast lane with the big girls like New Zealand’s Emma Twigg, the world bronze medalist, and US teamer Gevvie Stone, who has won the event twice in the last three years. And the new kid won’t be starting at the back of the pack. She drew bow No. 10, just ahead of Sarah Trowbridge, who rowed the double at the global regatta. “I don’t know why they stuck me there,’’ said Sherman, who says she can count her races in the single on one hand. “But that’s where I am.’’

Taking the line anywhere in the championship event against women twice her age would have seemed ludicrous to her three years ago, when she first pulled an oar. “If you’d asked me then if I’d be where I am now, I would have laughed,’’ Sherman said. “I would never have believed it.’’

A random glimpse led her to the boathouse. “My family used to go kayaking,’’ she said. “We saw a rowing team on the water and I said oh, Dad, I want to do that.’’ So Sherman, who lives in landlocked Los Alamitos, scouted out possible locations (“I think we Googled it.’’) and turned up at the Long Beach club, which for decades has accommodated everyone from Olympians to recreational rowers.

Sherman quickly made the progression from ergometer to wherry to four-oared shell and last year ended up rowing both in the quad that won the youth nationals and in the double that finished second. “After we medaled I said, OK, I like sculling better,’’ she said. Before long Sherman was in the US development pipeline, going to ID camps and, then, selection camps.