The Stories of Harvard: Morgan Henderson

The Stories of Harvard: Morgan Henderson ’06, Men's Heavyweight Rowing

The Stories of Harvard spotlights Harvard athletics alumni on their professional journey beyond their time in Cambridge and reflects on a specific game or event as a Crimson student-athlete from a first-person perspective.

An Introduction

My name is Morgan Henderson. I'm from Kensington, Maryland, and currently I work as a health policy researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

I joined The Hilltop Institute back in 2018. It's a research center within UMBC and that research center does a lot of work for the state of Maryland’s Medicaid program. Medicaid is basically government sponsored health insurance for low income people. Every state has its own Medicaid program, which differs a lot from state to state.

We do all kinds of analysis, ranging from quick one-off analyses to big multi-year evaluations and everything in between to help the state fulfill requirements that the federal government imposes or just to evaluate and understand how certain programs work and to hopefully make them work better.

Race Preview

Harvard men’s crew was the two-time defending National Champions entering the spring 2005 season. The HUBC varsity had a dominant run through the prior two seasons and Harvard was riding a 24-race win streak entering the Compton Cup against one of its biggest Ivy League rivals in Princeton.

Legendary head coach Harry Parker, a veteran of more than four decades at the helm of the program at this point, and his team had opened the season a week earlier with a win over Brown for the Stein Cup. The 2005 Compton Cup was raced on Lake Carnegie and hosted by Princeton in New Jersey and was an important indicator of how Harvard’s varsity boat, which was replacing the majority of its oarsmen from a year ago, stacked up against elite competition.

Morgan Henderson's Compton Cup Memories

A Race Three Years in the Making

Let me zoom out a little bit. So the way the team worked back then, freshmen were on their own team. Our coach was Bill Manning. Great coach, great guy.

My twin brother, Nick Henderson, and I came into Harvard in the fall of 2002. We were on the freshman team and it was a good team. It had won Eastern Sprints the year before and the year before that. So there was a good legacy of freshman teams. And we were a good team. We worked hard. We got along well. We had a lot of guys from the junior national team.

My freshman year, we came in second at the 2003 Eastern Sprints. We came second to Princeton. Everyone knew each other in the freshman league. Everyone had gone to high school together or rowed against each other in the summers. And so this Princeton team was very strong and all the guys knew each other across the team.

At this time, the varsity team, especially the first varsity at Harvard, was extraordinary. Just really, really, really good. They won everything. Undefeated. They won Sprints. They won IRAs by open water. Just a historically good team with a really good lineup.

Filling Out The Boat

That class of 2004 that was in most of the seats in that varsity. They raced in international races. They raced against Olympic teams and they did respectively well against them. That was a legendarily good team, this ’04 team.

Those seniors all graduate and there's a lot of question marks about how the team is going to be. We had two really extraordinary guys, Malcolm Howard and Aaron Holzapfel. They were returners from the ’03 and ’04 varsities. Both really good and great guys as well. We also had a transfer come in from U Washington. His name was Brodie Buckland and he was very, very strong.

Here I am, I'm a junior and I'd been in the 3V the year before. That fall, we didn't row eights at the Head of the Charles. I think that was a tactical decision. We didn't do an eight Head of the Charles, for example. The way that the team worked back then is we rowed even boats all year long in training, but the top guys raced in a four that fall.

By late March, we had settled on a varsity lineup. I was in the varsity. I was a little bit surprised. I did not see myself as a varsity contender. I had won the team triathlon on the heavyweight side (erg, run, stadium steps) that past fall so I had confidence in my fitness. I had belief in myself, but it was definitely, it was like a real transition year where no one knew what was going to happen.

Race Day

The race was on Princeton water. That was like an eight-hour bus ride for us and it was kind of a misty day, as I recall. This Princeton crew we were going up against, these are the same guys that beat my freshman crew.

The race itself, it just felt like we were flying. We got a lead. I certainly didn't think we would lose, but I didn't know what would happen.

We found ourselves up and there's some good motivational shouting from the guys in the Harvard boat. And then we just found ourselves up some more and we just kept extending the lead. Ultimately, I think we won by about six seconds.

That was amazing. I'm giving myself goosebumps just thinking about that. And so that was just some real affirmation that the boat was seriously fast.

The Recap

In what was billed by some as a “rebuilding year”, the fourth-ranked Harvard varsity made a statement on Saturday morning with a reloaded boat that claimed the Compton Cup in a time of 5:48.2; besting Princeton’s 5:54.6 by more than six seconds.

Harvard stunned the top-ranked Tigers with an open-water win that featured six new oarsmen in its boat from a year ago.

HUBC Lineup: Catherine Rudolph (coxswain), Adam Kosnicki (stroke), Malcolm Howard (seven), Brodie Buckland (six), Aaron Holzapfel (five), Morgan Henderson (four), Toby Medaris (three), Andrew Boston (two), Nick Baker (bow)

Henderson's Harvard Experience

Arriving in Cambridge

I rowed at HUBC with my identical twin brother, Nick. I was one of the twins. We're from a suburb of D.C. and went to public schools. Coming in, I remember we had dyed blonde hair because we'd been on the junior national team that summer. We were big rowers. Rowing was definitely part of our identity.

The academics were very important. Of course, I think it's got to be the case for anyone that ends up going to Harvard. So we were a couple of hardworking guys.

Rowing was everything. I slept, ate and breathed it.

Studying Economics

I remember I took EC 10 as many people do freshman year. And that the rap on EC 10 back then was that the grades were bad. You're going to get a bad grade, although it would eventually get curved. I remember the first of multiple EC 10 midterms I actually did pretty well. I think I got like a 60 or something. And that was good compared to the general distribution. So I thought, okay, interesting. Maybe I can do this. But I also had just been so thoroughly captivated by the rowing.

One fundamental thing for my career happened in junior year when I took this class on the economics of crime, and it was taught by a guy named Jeffrey Miron. It showed me the possibilities that economic research is actually really creative. I didn't even know economics was like that and so that showed there was a scope for real creativity in a kind of quantitative data-driven way that I just found completely intoxicating.

Later in my career at Harvard, I decided to write a senior honors thesis in economics. This was super last minute. I had trouble finding an advisor. It was kind of embarrassing. I was too busy rowing. So I eventually got assigned one by default. But I just worked hard and the thesis ended up going well. I got a good grade on it. And that was one of my data points of thinking, okay, economics. Maybe this is something I'll be good at.

Analytics and Research

Professional Journey Beyond Harvard

I had been captain of the rowing team, and so I was proud of that. But it was difficult after I graduated. I had to work for several years to get into the University of Michigan economics PhD program. I had concentrated in economics at Harvard, but getting into Michigan was far from a sure thing. While I was at Michigan, I did some work in health economics relating to Medicaid research and this is what eventually led me to my current work at Hilltop, where I do a lot of work on Medicaid for lower income populations.

Before I came to Hilltop, I had actually worked at Amazon as an economist; total other side of the professional spectrum. I was at Amazon HQ for one year. And I was on the team called Customer Promise. We were the team that, if you ever buy something on Amazon, you see a little text that says, ‘order within three hours and two minutes and get it by tomorrow’. I was on that team that decided how fast things should go. It was an interesting job, but not ultimately the direction I wanted my career to go.

Analytics is a lot of talking to people. It's a lot of trying to communicate results to various stakeholders, either on the state side or sometimes collaborating with other researchers, writing up our research. It's really a hybrid role. It's not just research. It's not just policy stuff. It's not just data analysis. It's really having a foot in a bunch of different camps and being flexible.

Be Persistent, Be Stubborn

A Rower’s Mentality

It's this weird routine where the rowers, you train every day, multiple times a day, typically. And the competition within the Harvard team was fierce. You never wanted to lose. You had to keep your head down and stay in your lane and just get that meat and potatoes work done.

Harry was a legend when I was there. What to say about Harry? At the time I'm this callow 21-year old. I'm thinking I know everything about the sport of rowing and he was he was pretty quiet. He would tell his athletes to be persistent. That was his thing. Be persistent. Your muscles are screaming, you're five minutes into a really hard workout and he would just say, ‘be persistent and be stubborn’. I may not have appreciated the wisdom in that at the time, but it is an incredibly good life lesson.

A Harvard Graduate

I think Harvard is such a special place. It was a great experience. I worked hard. I made some very good friends. I learned some things, certainly. To me, it's an opportunity I was lucky to have. I had to definitely believe in myself and work very hard and be humble. And these are all the lessons Harry taught. I wasn't consciously trying to follow Harry's teachings, but I did. I did follow them. They have sunk in and they served me very well.