They’re applying a similar degree of determination to another task: integrating their club.
“We wanted the club to be more representative of Milwaukee as a whole,” Huffman, who serves as the director of the club and the head coach of its high school girls’ team, says. He and Bott are well aware that Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in the United States, and that their club has historically skewed wealthy, white and suburban.
Conversely, the student body of the Fifty-Third Street School, where Bott works when he isn’t coaching for the club, is 94 percent black and 92 percent low-income. So Bott began reaching out to students there, promising them rides to and from practice and free rowing lessons (covered by a scholarship fund he helped create).
At first the kids, and their parents, were skeptical. But Bott eventually recruited a few students, who began encouraging their friends and neighbors to join up too. Offering swimming lessons also helped.
“What we have now is 10 kids from the central city coming here to row with a bunch of other kids from the suburbs,” Bott says. “And they have each other’s backs, and they work together, and they push each other, and they cheer each other on. They go from being completely separated, in two different worlds, to being in a boat together, moving as one, winning together, losing together, racing together, competing together.”
A lanky kid with a halo of dark-blond hair, Lawton says that he grew up around rowing – he has two older brothers who went through the club – and that he’ll be competing for Brown University next fall. “I actually just committed today,” he says, adding that “there are spots [for rowers] at a lot of great schools.”
Fitzgerald, a compact boy with big brown eyes, didn’t know much about rowing before Bott approached him, and he didn’t learn how to swim until after he started attending practices. But he’s quickly become hooked, and he says he’s made lots of friends through the sport. “I plan on doing it through high school and college, and maybe I’ll even go to the Olympics.”
GO SEE IT
Summer Scrimmage
The club will be hosting a summer scrimmage on June 23 at its boathouse at 101 W. Pleasant St. Middle and high school students will be racing, and families and community members are encouraged to stop by to cheer them on. “We’ll have food, and everyone’s welcome to come,” Huffman says. “It’s a good time for people who don’t know anything about rowing to watch some races and see what it’s all about.”
