Stanford is Recruiting Lightweights

Stanford's recruiting announcement for lightweights includes a FAQ that I think makes a couple of interesting points.

First it notes that over half of the current lightweight team learned to row in college. The number of experienced rowers is no doubt inflated by recent recruiting success because it was certainly lower a few years ago. Nonetheless, a few years ago Stanford was still placing in the top five at IRAs. This shows the importance of focusing on a lightweight program versus worrying about whether you have experience. Any national championship lightweight eight has rowers who never rowed before college. Even the experienced rowers simply found out that they love the sport early. If they made it to college not having rowed before, they would still have made the boat.

Another interesting point is that Stanford crew has one of the highest GPAs of all varsity teams on campus. This is generally true among all colleges and most (all?) of the more stringent academic institutions look to the crew programs to raise the overall varsity sport GPA.