By Bob Ford
There had to be an answer, and Mark Connell was desperate to find it.
Connell, a Catholic priest from the Archdiocese of New York, had already done a lot since being assigned to Newburgh, a small crime-ridden city on the Hudson River, 60 miles north of New York City. But there were pieces still to sort out, many of them, and the riddle before him may have been the most important one.
He had left his comfortable teaching position at Mount Saint Mary College and been the driving force in opening a safe-haven academy for at-risk middle-school students who needed to break out of the cycle of poverty and subpar education. That was good.
Connell had become headmaster of the school, San Miguel Academy of Newburgh, and the students there soon went on not only to complete high school—in a public-school district that graduated just one out of every 10–but also to continue their education beyond. And that was good.
From just one class of fifth-graders beginning in 2006, the academy grew steadily, adding a class every year until the program filled out and there was a graduating class of eighth-graders in 2010. And that was good, too.
“But we said to ourselves, ‘We can’t send these kids back to public school. That’s not enough of a change. We need something more dramatic,’” Connell said. “Someone said, ‘Let’s get them in boarding schools.’”
It was brilliant. There were many excellent boarding schools eager to diversify their student populations with kids from underserved communities who were motivated to learn.
“But we needed an edge. It’s a competitive market. I’ve got the Black kids that play basketball and the Hispanic kids that play soccer, but nobody was interested in basketball or soccer players. They had those,” Connell said.
“We tried lacrosse, and that was a dismal failure. You can’t teach a 12-year-old how to cradle a ball against suburban kids who have been doing it for years. We were losing like 21-1, and I didn’t think that was good for morale.”
There had to be an answer and, somewhat unexpectedly, there was. It had been right there all the time, flowing “silent but majestic … losing itself in the blue highlands,” in Washington Irving’s words describing the Hudson, and the idea shot through Connell like a wild current.
“Rowing, let’s try rowing,” he told the academy’s board of directors.
One of the board members said, “Mark, kids like ours don’t row. It’s too damn expensive.”
“‘If I take care of the money, can I have a go at it?’ And what could they say?” Connell said.
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Funding the program, figuring out the sport (Connell had rowed for one season at Poughkeepsie High School, but that apparently left room for further study), selling it to the kids, mastering the whims of the Hudson River—all of that took time.
Connell was expert at crossing the river to Westchester County to raise money. He preferred the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge to sculling but once across he sold people on buying boats and ergs and all the equipment that those students could never have gotten on their own.
They learned to row years before entering competitions, and the erg scores soon rivaled the classroom scores.
“That’s how it grew,” Connell said. “And then I started to watch the eyes of admissions counselors when I said, ‘Oh, this guy rows,’ or ‘This girl rows.’ They knew it was a different kind of kid.
“What the rowing world might not understand about us is that this is an academic program. Our mission is to break the cycle of poverty through education, right? Rowing serves our greater purpose, and rowing singlehandedly offers them everything that’s better for their lives.
“It’s amazing. I tell people all the time that if Scrabble did the same thing, we’d all be playing Scrabble here at San Miguel.”
The racing began in 2021 as the academy and the rest of the world began to emerge from Covid. The winning didn’t take long. San Miguel finished first in the U15 division at the USRowing Northeast Championships in 2022 to qualify for nationals, where it finished 11th overall.
Medals have stacked upon medals ever since. The academy races almost exclusively in coxed quads. It has four of them, along with one double. At the USRowing Indoor National Championships, a San Miguel rower has won gold three straight years in the U15 division: Jermain Stevens Jr. in 2024 and 2025, and Micah Fisher in February of this year. At the 2025 C.R.A.S.H.-B. Sprints World Indoor Rowing Championship in Waltham, Mass., Chanel Rodriguez won the girls’ gold; Stevens, the boys’ silver in the 2000-meter U15 race, and San Miguel also won the four-man relay. It was the first time the academy entered a relay event.
Winning is great, and a reward for the work involved, but getting to the finish line isn’t necessarily the goal. Getting to the start line is the goal.
“Who you are as a person shows when you row.” said Nicole Stevens, the mother of Jermain Stevens Jr. “Your job is to make everybody else on your team great. You have to work together. They depend on you. So you have to be disciplined. You need to practice. You need to make sure your technique is right. This is about character-building. And that’s what you get out of rowing.”
Jermain Stevens Jr., who recently turned 15, is a freshman at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark. He has trained there in a single, a double, and a quad, and was recently rowing stroke seat in the eight.
“He told me the workouts are extremely difficult and that he threw up after the first workout,” Nicole Stevens said. “He told me that’s how he knew it was going to be good.”
People connected with rowing—some interested in broadening participation in a sport with an elitist reputation, some just willing to help a program that helps kids—are eager to throw in with Connell’s mission.
“I went up there and I was floored by what this guy’s able to do,” said Mike Teti, the former U.S. National Team and Cal-Berkeley coach. “Father Mark is doing God’s work. He takes the kids that are on their last hope and when they move on they are well-spoken, articulate, and they succeed.
“Every day, they go from this little school and take the boats to the Hudson, walk the boats into the water, climb into the boats— these little kids all under 100 pounds—row on whitecaps, and then bring the boats back to the school.
“My jaw was on the ground. When you go there and see what they do, it’s a life-changing experience.”
Teti got involved through Arshay Cooper, the Chicago rower who was part of a pioneering all-Black team and whose foundation, A Most Beautiful Thing Inclusion Fund, is a major sponsor of San Miguel (as is the New York Giants Football Foundation, the Head of the Charles/Philadelphia Gold Cup Foundation, and USRowing).
Much of the additional funding and support for the academy and the rowing program still come from across the river in Westchester County. Connell became acquainted with the area when he was teaching at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh but was assigned by the archdiocese to hear Saturday confession and celebrate Sunday Mass at the Church of St. John & St. Mary in Chappaqua.
“So I’m living in these disparate environments—Monday through Friday in Newburgh, and weekends in Chappaqua, waving at Bill and Hillary across the street,” Connell said. “I would tell people from the pulpit what I was witnessing. I couldn’t believe I was even in the United States, the poverty was so bad. I would tell them what I was seeing, and I guess I got under their skin.”
Connell’s charitable ministry in Newburgh began modestly, with efforts to raise money to give out turkeys at Thanksgiving and toys at Christmas.
“You give out the turkey and realize that, two days later, the family’s going to be hungry all over,” he said.
The idea to establish a small school to help as many kids as possible grew from there. Right now, there are about 60 students in the academy, and the total number who have gone through San Miguel is over 300. Every student is in the rowing program.
“It was very organic. None of us knew what we were doing from the get-go,” Connell said. “Our kids grow up with a high level of trauma. They witness violence and see things no child should see.
“We find they are drawn to the serenity that we offer, and that the sport of rowing offers. They learn to swim. They get to go down to the river. On top of that, these kids learn the executive functioning that no one in their lives has modeled for them.
“Guess what? If you put four athletes in a boat with a coxswain on the Hudson River, if they don’t know how to work together and take care of each other, they’re all going to die. But they figure it out.”
One of Connell’s wingmen on his fundraising excursions has been Jim Gagliano, a former longtime FBI agent who headed up the Hudson Valley Safe Streets Task Force and was later the mayor of Cornwall-on-Hudson, a town just south of Newburgh.
“I would have said about the academy and the rowing program that it may look good on paper but I don’t see how it can work. I know the streets too well. I know Newburgh too well,” Gagliano said. “But if you marry that with Father Mark’s force of personality and leadership, and, I guess, divine inspiration, then, well, you’ve got something.
“This is a holy man who believes deeply in his faith and this outreach. I’m not going to say he’s Mother Teresa in Calcutta with the lepers, but if you equate that to America, he’s doing a similar thing. And he uses the rowing as a carrot. ‘Hey, come here. We’re going to do something really cool. We’re going to put you on the water and make you part of a team.’”
The teams on the streets of Newburgh are largely gangs. The two most prominent are the Bloods and the Latin Kings, who are regularly at war over turf and drug distribution routes. They recruit kids at 10 or 11 years old to become drug runners and to lure them into gang life. That’s just about the age when San Miguel Academy is giving as many as possible an alternative.
“It’s such a great population to serve. They’re so hungry for something better,” Connell said.
They find it in the school, and they find it on the water after they put in at Cornwall Landing, an arrangement that began when Gagliano was mayor and continued after his retirement.
“As mayor, I got complaints about damn near everything,” Gagliano said. “But no one ever once complained about the San Miguel Academy kids being down there. We’re all rooting for them and Father Mark.”
BOB FORD, a seven-time Pennsylvania Sportswriter of the Year, wrote for The Philadelphia Inquirer for more than 30 years, during which he covered plenty of rowing. His rowing-related thrills included stories about Prince Albert of Monaco, grandson of Jack Kelly, the fabled Philadelphia oarsman—albeit focused on bobsledding.
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