Parents — City Island Rowing

Expectations

What we ask of athletes — and of you

Of athletes

Show up. Rowing is the ultimate team sport — a missing seat changes every lineup. Consistent attendance is the single biggest input to boat speed and boatings.
Do the independent work. U19s and U17s carry short steady-state pieces on their own time. It's a small load, and it's real.
Look after each other. Sister groups aren't ceremonial. Bigs mentor littles; littles become bigs.

Of families

Plan around the calendar. The full year is published in advance — it's all here — so holidays, tutors, and test dates can be booked around racing.
Get her to the water. There's a vibrant carpool community to plug into — and if you're ever stuck, your athlete can ask her big sister for help.
Take a shift. The PA tent is the heart of every regatta — help on race day, shop the day before, set up or pack down. An army marches on its stomach; so does a rowing team. It's also the best way to meet your athlete's teammates' parents — and there's nothing a girl rows harder for than to make her parents proud.

Logistics

How the machine runs

Home water

City Island

We row from City Island in the Bronx — Long Island Sound to the east, Eastchester Bay to the west, and the calmest evening water in New York. Manhattan and Westchester families both make it work; carpools are the club's circulatory system.

Regatta travel

Race weekends

Fall brings day trips (New Jersey, Port Washington, our own Halloween Throwdown) and two overnights — Schenectady and Saratoga — with a team hotel block — families and athletes stay at the same hotel. Details for each trip arrive by email well in advance.

Gear

What she needs

The Boathouse team shop is open 9/1–9/5 only (splash jacket is the essential; it's navy, not black). Racing uni orders close 9/5. Everyday CIR merch runs year-round on SquadLocker. All ordering links and forms live on the Fall Master Spreadsheet, emailed to families.

The one paragraph to build the year around

Spring is championship season. An athlete who travels during it hurts her crew's ability to train and perform — so take vacations at Thanksgiving, over the winter holiday break, and in the second half of February break. Summer rowing (6/21–8/8) is the best rowing of the year: row July, travel August.

The Deeper Version

Why we train 12 hours, not 20

The NCAA limits college athletes to 20 hours of training a week. Some high school programs in this area train near or at that number — and, said plainly, that's absurd for a growing teenager. Your daughter is a person to be built, not a cog in someone's results machine.

We train about 12 hours a week, and we remain regionally and nationally competitive with crews that train 16 and 18 — qualifying boats for Youth Nationals year after year. We are not asking less of your daughter — we are asking better: precise technical work, purposeful erg pieces, planned recovery. Efficiency is a performance strategy that happens to be the healthy one, not the other way around.

The schedule is engineered to protect four things: schoolwork, family, physical health, and rest. The sports-medicine consensus is blunt about why: growing bodies need rest, and overtraining in adolescence is where overuse injuries — and burned-out athletes — are born.

A girl who is healthy, rested, and still in love with the sport at 18 outperforms one who peaked, hurt, at 15 — in racing, and in the recruiting process that follows it. The full philosophy →

The People

Who runs the club

City Island Rowing is a nonprofit governed by a parent board.

Board & Key Roles
President	Chris Renzulli
Vice President	Patrick Convery
Treasurer	Chris Croft
Secretary	Maura McDonagh
Member at Large	Amy Pisano
Head Coach	Guy Monseair
Parent Assoc. Chairs	Nicole Tuck · Toby Leddy
SafeSport Officer	Kristen Renzulli
Novice Parent Liaison	Jenn Caiola

Questions of any kind: cityislandrowing@gmail.com.