The 2022 Senior Perspectives is the 17th in a series of annual collections. Senior captains and representatives of teams at Harvard have been invited to contribute viewpoints based on personal experience from both their senior seasons and full varsity careers at Harvard.

Michael Cheng
Hometown: Philadelphia, Pa.
Concentration: History and Mathematics
House Affiliation: Quincy

A Stroke Without Friction
 
I was never meant to be a Harvard rower.
 
Clumsy and chubby as a child, I was the Asian kid picked last in gym class, the wanderer who never quite fit inside anyone's expectations. If you told anyone who knew me in high school that I would be a varsity athlete in college, they would have laughed. Indeed, I barely understood that rowing existed during my first two years at Harvard, where I was lost in an unfamiliar culture and almost transferred out. When the coronavirus forced a March 2020 campus evacuation, I was not unhappy to leave.
 
In August 2020, I returned to Harvard for my junior year. Although all coursework and almost all College-sponsored programming was virtual, I was fortunate to live on campus. In a remarkable stroke of fate, I discovered rowing after logging onto the virtual activities fair and being randomly placed in a booth with men's lightweight rowing coach Ian Accomando. Ian informed me that the freshman walk-on rowing program would continue in person for on-campus residents. I decided to join, despite being a junior who did not know how to swim.
 
For my entire junior year, rowing was my only real class. Every day, Ian Accomando and Jesse Foglia provided one-on-one sculling (two-oared rowing) instruction to me and eight other novice rowers. They demonstrated boundless kindness and patience as we messed up basic stroke sequencing, rowed through the wrong bridges and flipped boats in the Charles River. I sustained a weekly diet of grueling stadium runs, lifts and attempts to teach myself breaststroke through blister-soaked hands. I lived for the rare moments where the boat seamlessly sang through the water.
 
Amid a maze of shifting pandemic restrictions and social uncertainty, rowing was an anchor of hope. It was a chance to strive for something impossible, to aim for unimaginable fitness standards and timeless competitions like "Eastern Sprints" and "Henley" that filled rowers' lore. I did everything I could to develop as a rower, from hours a day of additional erging and running, to tracking my nutritional intake on a spreadsheet, to waking up at 4:07am daily in Summer 2021 to carpool with teammates to a local rowing club.
 
I gobbled dozens of books about rowing, including a book about a woman who walked onto her college rowing team during her junior spring, then six years later won Olympic gold at Beijing.
 
Since the 2021 competition season was canceled, my senior year represented my only real season with HVL. Unfortunately, my athletic performance did not live up to the hope of my junior-year self. I did not exceed the fitness standards I had hit during the depths of the pandemic as the distractions of the world returned. Although I was privileged enough to compete, I was always on the edge of decent.
 
Nevertheless, I had a team who believed in me and accepted me for who I am, with all my imperfections. Although rowing is a hierarchical sport, time and time again I was surprised by how guys genuinely cared for me in a way that I found nowhere else at Harvard. They put time aside when I was down, invited me on trips and spent hours shooting the breeze.
 
This was especially impressive considering our differences—I did not attend private school and have no legacy connection to Harvard. I received a level of support that I never imagined I could find at Harvard, during a historic pandemic, inside a 122-year old boathouse, through a sport tinged with tradition and exclusivity.
 
Not everything old is bad, and not everything new is good.