Grace under pressure.

This mantra has lead the women’s rowing team to four straight NCAA Division II national championships, a feat no other collegiate women's rowing team in any division has ever accomplished.

The mantra is so important to the team they named the varsity-eight boat, a 13-second winner in Sunday’s grand final, “Grace.”

Before the start of the season last September, senior team captain Metta Gilbert said she heard a lot of speculation about whether or not the team could accomplish a feat no other school had come close to matching — four championship victories in four seasons.

When pressed to speculate about the future, she always had the same answer.

“I never questioned whether or not we could do it, but we thought about the ‘what if,’” she said. “We all knew we were thinking about it, but we needed to talk about what needed to get done at practice and that was it.”

After a year of waking up at 4:30 a.m. daily for practice an hour later, Gilbert said one of the keys to the team’s success the past four years is the dedication individual team members have shown to continuing tradition of success.  

Because everyone on the team is a natural athlete and passionate about the team, Gilbert said the team members never have a problem with having to dedicate so much time to keeping in shape for the team.

“As a rower on this team, you realize everyone is going through the same thing —  it’s like a support group,” Gilbert said. “Everybody has emotional swings throughout the season, and we help each other through it.”

Few team members on the team felt the emotional swings on the team like Gilbert, who in her fourth year on the national-championship team lead the team to victory in her final race as a Viking.

With a year filled with school work, family relationships and personal relationships in addition to the dedication required to be a part of the rowing team, Gilbert said feeling like a human being while balancing it all can be hard.

But when the varsity-eight boat crossed the finish line Sunday in the final race of her collegiate career, Gilbert said the amount of effort she had to put forth throughout the year was worth it, just like it has been every year since she was a freshman.

“Before the last race, the four seniors all got emotional,” she said. “We knew it wasn’t the time to be, but we were all so passionate about the race. [The victory] is the perfect ending to a perfect four years on the team.”

It wasn’t just the seniors feeling the weight of their accomplishment.

Western junior assistant captain Audrey Coon said the entire team, from Western freshmen Katie Tipton and Casey Mapes in the varsity-four boat to the team captains in the eight boat, were overcome by the feeling of relief following Sunday’s championship victory.

“I wasn’t expecting to be as emotional as it was,” Coon said. “A lot of anticipation, a lot of preparation and it all culminated in the grand final.

[Crossing the finish line] was pretty bittersweet — I knew it was the last time I was going to race with the girls in that boat, and I know there wasn’t a dry eye in that boat.”

Although the team members dedicate so much of their time to the team, one of the most important factors to their continued success is the leadership provided by head coach John Fuchs, Gilbert said.

In his 10th year as a coach at Western, Fuchs to this day is a man of few words, Gilbert said. Although he lets the team develop on its own under his direction, Gilbert said the team knows that when Fuchs speaks at practice, the words are both meaningful and powerful.

One of the most impressive aspects of his leadership is his ability to trust and put faith in the rowers, Gilbert said.

Rather than provide a  hands-on approach to coaching, Gilbert said the success of Fuchs’ method of coaching isn’t  noticed until after practices are finished.

“It takes a really special guy to handle women all the time,” Gilbert said. “With a team full of estrogen, I have no idea how he handles it.”

Under Fuchs’ leadership, the team has seen an intense work ethic develop among the team, Coon said. In addition to practicing throughout the year for individual races, Coon said the team works out individually throughout the summer, so they are in peak shape by the time the first day of school comes around in the fall.

Fuchs provides the team members with schedules for workouts to complete while at home during the summer break, but participating is in no way mandatory, Coon said.

However, because the team members are dedicated to performing well for the team and compete for spots in the competitive boats, getting everyone to workout according to Fuchs' schedule during the summer is no problem, Coon said.

“We’re naturally athletic people, and we enjoy being athletes,” Coon said. “Working out is not a chore or something we dread. We train all year round. It’s a pretty intense college sport — it’s not ‘come back and relax’ time.”

In order to stay competitive next year, the team will have to stay true to its intense work ethic, as four of the team members including Gilbert, are graduating and leaving big shoes for the younger members to fill.

However, because of the tradition of success established by Fuchs’ coaching, the dedication of the team members to physical training and the emotional connection developed by the team as the result of having to overcome so many hardships, Coon said she sees no reason to worry about the future.

“It would be so easy to say ‘yeah, number five, number six — there’s no stopping us,’” Coon said. “But I think what’s important to remember is to stay in the moment, come back next year and assess what we need to do to prepare for upcoming races. We don’t go expecting to do amazing, but we just happen to do really amazing.”

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