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Former Brown rower Kate Saul is a
self-proclaimed “non-athlete.” But for someone who
claims to be very non-athletic, Saul sure is
accomplished in her sporting life.
Briefly consider the facts:
--Two team NCAA National Championships (1999 & 2000)
--Five Individual NCAA National Championships (1997, two in
1999, two in 2000)
--Fastest time ever for varsity Fours in the NCAA
Championships
--Four-year letterwinner
--Two-time Academic All-Ivy (junior and senior year)
--Second team Academic All-American her junior year
Yet despite all of her achievements, the ever-modest Saul
never really competed as an athlete growing up. When asked
what sports she played as a child, she says with a chuckle,
“None! I was never really very athletic at all. I was
much more into school and drama…that sort of
stuff.”
However, when Saul was in high school in Arlington, Va.,
several of her friends decided to try out for the rowing
team.
“They made me come along, saying I was a good size to
be a coxswain, and they promised me that I wouldn’t
have to do anything physical which, of course, was a big
lie,” she says with a laugh.
In being the coxswain, Saul thought she found a perfect fit
for her “non-athletic” endeavor. But the coxswain
is an athlete, and arguably the most important one on
the team at that. Saul discusses her duties as the coxswain
for Brown, and the list seems endless. After three or four
duties, you think, “Wow, that’s a lot of things to
do in a race.” But she’s not done. She gives
another responsibility, and another, and another.
In the Brown program, the coxswain walks a fine line between
being a coach and a member of the team. In some programs,
the coxswain is primarily in charge of steering the boat and
carrying out the orders of the coach. However, Saul’s
coxswain duties were so much more involved and complex that
one gets the feeling that even her descriptions fall
woefully short.
“You can add to the speed of the boat by acting more as
an assistant coach,” she says. “You have a view of
the rowers that no one else has because you’re looking
straight down the boat. You can really see things synchrony,
you can feel the way the boat’s moving, and you can
understand things about the boat by feeling it that you
might not be able to if you were outside the boat.”
Saul constantly updated her rowers on what was happening in
the race…unless it was to their advantage not to know
where the competition was on the river. She was,
essentially, the coach once the boat hit the water.
“During the races you’re in charge of
strategy,” she says. “Because the coach isn’t
there anymore. So it comes down to you and you’re the
only one talking. You have to tell them where they are on
the race course and decide when to speed up or slow down in
terms of the strategies, and to make sure you have enough
energy to last the whole race, but that you’re going
hard at the most appropriate time.”
It’s almost mentally exhausting listening to Saul
explain the different responsibilities of the coxswain. And
yet, there’s still more to do.
“There are a lot of different aspects to it, and
different programs encourage different ones,” she says.
“But the best coxswains, I think, are a little bit of
all of that &endash; where the steering and administrative
part of it are second nature, and then your real job
becomes coaching and holding the team together because
you’re really the liaison between the coach and the
team. So you have to make sure you’re on the same page
as the coach and trying to work toward the same goals as the
rowers and working together to understand the dynamics and
the personalities of the boat.”
Indeed, Saul got more than she bargained for when she
decided to be a coxswain, but she loved doing it…and
she was great.
The Brown Bears won a national championship in Saul’s
first year with the program (1997) in the varsity fours
competition when they narrowly defeated perennial national
power University of Washington. They finished third overall
that year, and finished second as a team in 1998. But in
1999 and 2000 &endash; Saul’s junior and senior years
&endash; the Bears took that next step and won the team
overall title. The team victory in 1999 was capped with a
three second victory over the University of Virginia in the
heavyweight eights. It was the first national championship
ever in any sport for Brown University &endash; men or
women.
In 2000, when the Bears won their second consecutive
national championship, they defeated their main rival
&endash; the University of Washington. Heading into the
final race of the championships (I Eights), Brown led their
counterparts by just one point. But the Bears surged ahead
from the start in the final race and never trailed
Washington, who would finish second in the race and the team
standings. Saul credits that victory, among others, as one
of her best memories.
“It was beyond words how exciting that was,” she
says. “The whole series of races.”
Saul majored in mechanical engineering, and it was that
interest &endash; not rowing &endash; that led her to
Brown’s campus in the fall of 1996. However, she has
used a unique blend of both interests in her post-Brown
success. She recently earned her master’s degree in
biomechanical engineering from Stanford University, and is
now pursuing her doctorate at the same institution. A major
part of her research at Stanford is the upper extremities of
the arm, no doubt a major part of rowing as well. It’s
certainly no stretch to say that some of her experiences in
rowing and biomechanical engineering have overlapped over
the years.
“Being an engineer helped me understand, maybe in a
different way, the ideal way to row,” she says.
“And it put a physical association to my engineering
background, and also an engineering background to rowing. So
it encouraged me in both directions. By being a
biomechanical engineer, what I’m looking at now are
forces occurring, different motions in the body, and how
that contributes to injury. In rowing, a lot of the times
what I’m looking at is not only how you use those
forces to make the boat go faster, but also to prevent
injury. So I was able to see who was going to get a back
injury just by seeing where the forces were going in their
back by the way they were rowing.”
Saul has blended her expertise in each field with the same
fluidity from her rowing days in Providence. She is
finishing up her work on a working computer model of a human
arm.
“Once it’s done, it can be used for all sorts of
things, such as modeling surgery, trying to figure out how
good the outcomes of the surgery will be,” she says.
“A lot of people, such as stroke victims or people who
have spinal cord injuries, don’t always have full
mobility of their arms and there are certain surgeries you
can do that might allow them to use their hands again. Our
computer model will be able to model them so you can be able
to tell whether the surgery would have a good outcome for
different patients or for different situations.”
Her research is in conjunction with Dr. Scott Delp and Dr.
Wendy Murray, both of whom are Stanford professors and
researchers in the Neuromuscular
Biomechanics Laboratory in
the Biomechanical
Engineering Division of the
Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford. There are
other models of human parts being developed throughout
Saul’s laboratory &endash; models of legs and the
heart, to name a few. She admits that she frequently uses
rowing as a project in her biomechanics lab, conjuring up
images of Saul assembling an elite team of bionic rowers.
All kidding aside, Saul’s work is extremely important
to the understanding of elements of the human body, and her
exposure to these different areas will serve her well in the
future.
“We’re right in the heart of Silicon Valley, and
we get to work with a lot of professors who have started
their own businesses in this field,” she says.
“These things that we’re doing in our lab become
actual products for sale, so they do help people. And
that’s the nice thing.”
Saul has obviously benefited from being an athlete in her
life, sort of an incredible feat given her inauspicious
start. She has seen sports from both sides of the spectrum
-- from being an athlete, as well as not being an athlete.
And she is appreciative of what playing sports has given her
in life.
“When you’re a kid and you’re not at all
athletic, it’s definitely hard because you have gym
class every day and all that kind of stuff, and I was never
good at that. And it made me not want to try to do things
because I was worried that I would be bad at it
athletically,” she says. “But doing crew and
feeling like I’m good at a sport and finding a niche in
the athletic world has really made me more open to trying
things and thinking, ‘Well, maybe there is another
niche out there for me.’ But, in addition to that, crew
gives me the atmosphere of having a team, which I never had
before. And the competitiveness that it brings out of you
was really fun, and people doing the same things with the
same amount of dedication at all these other schools.
It’s really kind of a bond.”
She has this to offer young athletes who are thinking of
getting involved in sports: “It’s an experience
unlike any other you could ever have. So, if you’re
thinking about it, you should definitely go for it,”
she says. “And rowing in particular is a really
exciting sport with a team aspect unlike any other sport.
It’s so reliant on having everybody there every single
day. You really have to be dedicated, but you get the same
amount of dedication from everybody else. So, it’s an
exciting atmosphere to be around people who are excited too,
and that carries over into every other aspect of your life.
It makes you want to be that dedicated about
anything.”
--by Nathan Fry
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