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.

Tate Huffman
Hometown: Greenwich, Conn.
Concentration: Applied Mathematics
House Affiliation: Dunster

A funny thing about the Charles River is that it's not all that deep. Sure, there are pockets by the Boston shore between the Mass. Ave. and Longfellow Bridges where the river floor can get up to eight to 10 yards beneath the surface, but for most of the stretches the Harvard men's lightweight team rows on, the bottom of the river is less than nine feet away. The area by the start of the 2k racecourse is so shallow, in fact, that if the spirit took you – and you didn't have to rush back to Newell to make your 9 a.m. class – you could just hop out of the boat and wade around (though you'd be introducing yourself to whatever detritus has accumulated at the bottom of the Basin over the years). Basically, wherever you are, no matter how deep the river looks from inside the boat, you're much closer to solid ground than you think.

Having chosen Harvard largely due to a love of Matt Damon and a surprisingly strong instinct for masochistic self-immersion as a New York sports fan, I walked onto HVL as a first-year in the fall of 2017 not really knowing what I had gotten myself into. After rowing in high school, I figured it couldn't be too much different – new river, new boathouse, new teammates, but at the end of the day, you're still just trying to follow the guy in front of you and send the boat along as best you can. On my first day of practice, though, our assistant coach spent 10 minutes recreating Al Pacino's "Inches" speech from Any Given Sunday word-for-word while we were doing what I had previously thought to be basic warm-up drills. This, I realized at the time, was not what I was used to. And when you're totally new to a space or a group, unfamiliar with its history and customs, it's very easy to tell yourself that the safest thing to do is stay in the background, observe for a bit and then jump in if you feel comfortable, and to shrink away if not.

But I never had to make that choice. From that first day on the water, to 90-minute ergs in the brutal humidity of early-fall Cambridge, to Mather Pint Nights, to Quincy brunches after Saturday morning practice: in every moment I've spent with HVL, my teammates – whether consciously or not – have made it so much easier for me to come back day after day, with more enthusiasm than before. When you spend thousands upon thousands of hours training over several years, for races and competitions that last for mere fractions of that accumulated time, you need to be able to draw on something much deeper than a surface-level enjoyment to power your motivation and training. This was not something I fully realized until returning to Newell in the fall of 2021, but when I stepped foot in that hallowed building, where my strongest, most lasting and wholly indescribable friendships have been formed, the totality of the previous 18 months – the cancellation of our seasons, the departure of two beloved senior classes and the remarkable gratitude felt for the opportunity to row with my best friends once more – became overwhelming, and I sat on the dock and cried. Since then, I've vowed to really savor every moment on the team, because you truly never know when it might end. Cliché? Absolutely. But can something really be cliché without being, in some way, true?

My journey on this team has been far from typical, full of setbacks and success, twists and turns that bear little resemblance to the experiences of many of my teammates. But regardless, that common bond we all share – the value of pure hard work, the desire to contribute to something greater than ourselves, and most of all to be a part of a true team, in the fullest sense of the word – is what ties us all together. It's why I'm so grateful for this school in the first place, and why I could not imagine having spent these years of my life anywhere else. And it's why no matter how choppy the waters of my time at Harvard can become, or how brutal the headwinds of postgrad life might be, I know I will be more than capable of facing those adverse conditions – because the support and companionship of my teammates will always be right there, solid ground just beneath the surface.
Thank you, HVL. Hoorah.
 
TJHLP'22