It sounds like a joke, if not an impossibility, but the Manley crew team is taking itself and its sport quite seriously.
That’s right, there’s a crew team on the West Side, where you’re supposed to dunk basketballs, not coxswains.
It’s like finding a simplified tax code or a clue in the Blackhawks’ front office, and no one is more amazed than the 23 Manley students who are dipping their toes into very foreign waters.
“This is probably the last thing I would have thought of, to tell you the truth,” junior Arthur White said last week after he and several teammates finished a workout at the Lincoln Park lagoon.
“Manley is a basketball school,” sophomore Preston Grandberry added. “People don’t expect this on the West Side of Chicago.”
But then no one expected Ken Alpart, a 32-year-old options and futures trader, would start Urban Options, a foundation dedicated to aiding West Side kids, in 1996 and that one day last summer Alpart and Michael O’Gorman–both former Penn crew team members–would be sitting around the offices at the Alpart Trading Co. and O’Gorman would say, “Why don’t you start a crew team at an inner-city school?”
This sounded like perfect nonsense because crew generally is everything inner-city schools are not: private school, affluent and . . . well, white. But it made perfect sense to Alpart because crew teaches some of the same lessons Urban Options is trying to.
“Crew is different than baseball and basketball in terms of the type of people who tend to do well in it,” Alpart said. “It’s not natural athletic ability that’s important as much as being willing to work your butt off and have discipline and commitment and focus.”
Alpart also relished the prospect of helping to change the largely pale face of crew as well as altering some notions about black athletes.
“There’s the stereotype of basketball versus the stereotype of crew,” he said. “That black kids can play basketball because they’re athletic, but crew is a thinking person’s sport and a sport dominated by wealthy prep schools.
“We’re trying not only to give kids an opportunity to row but also show crew is a sport people in these communities can excel in because of their ability to think and focus and concentrate and those types of things that have stereotypically been discounted.”
So last fall, Alpart, O’Gorman and a few others from the rowing community set up shop in the Manley cafeteria with a shell and a tape showing Olympic crew races.
“I had my tray in my hand and I’m walking past this big old boat and it’s like, `Whoa, a crew team,’ ” Grandberry said. “I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it was rowing because there was a boat and the TV show.”
More than 100 students eventually signed up for the team, but only eight showed up Feb. 15 for the first practice. The number gradually grew to 35 before dropping to 23, which includes five girls.
They form one of just five Chicago-area high school crew teams, joining Loyola, St. Ignatius, Woodlands and Kenwood, the latter the only other Public League team.
Alpart hired two part-time coaches, fitness trainer Victor Finley-Brown and University of Chicago graduate student Jessica VandeVusse. The two conducted two months of land training, which included work on rowing machines.
Alpart, meanwhile, arranged for swimming lessons because most of his athletes couldn’t swim.
Last month, the team started going to the Lincoln Park Boat Club to handle real equipment and learn that an eight-oared shell isn’t as tipsy as it looks. But the Manley crew got its actual introduction to rowing on a mid-April trip to Philadelphia.
It wasn’t your typical spring break, not with a 16-hour bus ride each way and reveille at 5 a.m. for rowing practice at Penn. The 19 students who made the trip crammed a month’s worth of crew instruction into a week, but their biggest growth came off the water.
They discussed college life with several African-American Penn students, attended classes and learned about the admissions process from school officials.
“It all made me want to go to college more,” Grandberry said.
That, Alpart said, is what the crew program is really about. He wants to field fast boats but said he’s more interested in using rowing to keep kids in school, increase their self-esteem and help them get admitted to college with good financial-aid packages.
It’s why the crew team has regular study sessions and guest speakers and why it will undertake a community project this summer. It’s also why Manley Principal Katherine Flanagan OKd the crew experiment once she knew Urban Options would take responsibility for it.
“Anytime we can introduce our kids to things they would not normally see and expand their horizons, we should try,” she said.
White is one reason why. An A student, he was hardly struggling in the classroom, but he said crew, his first extracurricular activity, has taught him about leadership and responsibility.
“It has given me a more positive attitude and more confidence,” said White, the team’s captain.
Manley’s crew still struggles at times to tell the bow from the stern, and getting the boat into the water and away from the dock can be an adventure; but one week shy of traveling to Cincinnati for its first official race, it looks surprisingly smooth in the water.
Alpart, who so far has funded most of the program himself, figures progress will be even swifter if Urban Options can raise enough money to buy its own boats. It is currently borrowing equipment from the Lincoln Park Boat Club through Bruce Smith, who coaches Loyola and is president of the Chicago Union Boat House.
Alpart also wants to raise money to fund college scholarships for crew members.
His athletes, though, already seem to feel privileged, partly because they like rowing and partly because they know they are pioneers.
“We’re showing black people can do other sports as well as basketball,” junior Elliott Moore said. “It shows black people can step up and do other things.”
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Send e-mail to Barry Temkin at BarTem@aol.com
