Pulling together: Lessons from first all-Black high school rowing team

Arshay Cooper knew, almost in a single moment, that he had to find a way to write his story.

Over 20 years ago, he was captain of the first all-Black high school rowing team, a crew that launched in 1997 when he was a student at Manley Career Academy High School on the West Side of Chicago, in what is still one of the most violent neighborhoods in the nation.

How could a Black kid like him from the West Side of Chicago, “a war zone” of gang turfs and drug corners, he says, punctuated by the perpetual sound of gunshots and police sirens, discover the most peaceful and restoring moments of his life within the rhythmic pulls of rowing?

“A teacher would always say, ‘Oh, Arshay, you are a walking storm,’” says Mr. Cooper, whose 2020 memoir “A Most Beautiful Thing,” along with a documentary of the same name, has captivated the rowing world and many others this year. “But rowing was the only sport that was able to calm the storm in a lot of us, and it was beautiful.” 

Like much of the nation today, the rowing world, so steeped in symbols of wealth and white privilege, has been reexamining its efforts to make college programs and rowing clubs better reflect the full array of people in society.

Yet if the story of the nation’s first all-Black high school rowing team offers a glimpse of how to make these efforts work – launching Mr. Cooper, too, as an eager ambassador for a sport that remains overwhelmingly white – it began more simply. It was just an effort to reach out to students who looked like him, who were enduring the same kind of despair he had growing up on the streets of Chicago.

It was true – rowing helped calm the storms within him by instilling practical traits: discipline and determination and a deeper understanding of

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