The United States is a country that expects excellence. Ever since George Washington spoke of “the last great experiment for promoting human happiness,” Americans have grown accustomed to being exceptional. That presumption extends to athletics, where American athletes on the international stage compete with the expectation of success. And with good reason.

The American collegiate athletics system is unmatched anywhere else in the world. In most other countries, young athletes must choose usually between a traditional college education and elite athletics. This is why in recent decades  many U.S. universities have seen an influx of international athletes on their sports teams, including rowing. Athletes from all over the globe seek to take advantage of the unique opportunity here to get a top-tier education in four years without sacrificing elite training and competition, and vice versa.

American athletic excellence extends to the international stage, where the U.S. is a perennial presence on the Olympic medals stand. The U.S. topped the medal count at the Tokyo Olympics, has the highest total medal count for all summer Olympics, and is second for the winter edition.

Such achievements, however, are not a foregone conclusion, and there is always room for more efficient and effective systems. There is nothing inherent about the United States that guarantees that our traditional record of accomplishment will continue forever, as we saw when U.S. rowers failed to bring home a single medal from the Tokyo Olympics. The reality of the U.S. system is that our strengths are often simultaneously our weaknesses.

This is certainly the case for American rowing. Our expansive and populous country makes athlete identification and tracking unwieldy. Numerous opportunities—athletic, academic, professional—make athlete retention at every level of the sport challenging. If Americans are not only to return to the Olympic podium but also to remain a global rowing power, a better structure is needed.

Enter USRowing’s Pathways program.

Rolled out in October, Pathways aims to create a direct link from junior rowing to the senior U.S. National Team. Through clear communication and expectation-setting, it’s about building an efficient system for identifying and developing athletes of all ages from coast to coast. The ultimate goal: a stronger, more successful senior team.

When Josy Verdonkschot took over as USRowing’s chief high-performance officer in January 2022, he found a pipeline that was “more or less without a vision, philosophy, or structure.”

“We had under-23 camps. We had under-19 camps. But I couldn’t really see a common denominator and I couldn’t see the structure expressing a philosophy of how the different stages connect.”

This, he knew, needed to improve. After leading the Dutch women to three medals at the Tokyo Olympics and, including his time in Italy and Belgium, coaching crews to a total of seven Olympic medals, Verdonkschot knew what constitutes elite success.

Simultaneously, Brett Gorman, a veteran USRowing staffer and former coach at the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia, recognized the need for a more streamlined and efficient system for identifying and developing talent. Gorman, who had served as director of athlete identification and development, was in early 2023 director of learning and development when a position opened to lead the camp system.

At the time, Rich Cacioppo, USRowing’s executive director, came to her and asked about ways to run the camps better.

“Rich brought it to me and said, ‘I think we need to rethink camps,’” recalled Gorman. “I saw a lot of parallels between the needs on the high-performance side and our camps—our U19 selection camps, our U23 camps, our senior-team camps—as well as how we can have more continuity overall. So I wrote up a job description.”

Before Pathways, various USRowing camps were managed by different parts of the organization. The selection camps for U19, U23, and senior U.S. National Teams fell under the high-performance umbrella because they led directly to the National Team and competition at various world championships.

But other camps—Olympic Development Program (ODP), Youth Development Camps (YDC), Selection Development Camps (SDC)—fell under the domestic side of USRowing.

This is where the breakdown was occurring.

“Even though they live in different parts of USRowing, they have to be linked,” Gorman explained. “You have athletes who are just missing selection camp and now they’re going way over here. There have to be linkages.

“We have the quantity but we’re not mining or fostering it.”

In other words, athletes were slipping through the cracks.

So Gorman, with no intention of taking the job herself, wrote a job description for what became ultimately the Director of High Performance Pathways.

“It wasn’t specific to me.” Gorman said. “It was what we needed as an organization. It was creating one true pathway up to the National Team.”

Verdonkschot agreed. He had been in the U.S. for well over a year and in that time had come to recognize the need to build linkages among the various camps to achieve success at the elite level.

Gorman and Verdonkschot discussed what that might look like and how best to achieve it.

“Once you start defining what you need at the Olympic and Paralympic level, the next step is looking at the trajectory to get there,” Verdonkschot explained. “Define the steps, and then make it accessible for everybody.”

In the summer of 2023, Verdonkschot, who’d already begun to pull Gorman toward the high-performance side of the organization, asked her to help with recruiting and organizing the U23 selection camps, something Gorman had done in her previous role in athlete development.

In October, when the Pathways program was announced, so too was the first Director of High Performance Pathways—Gorman. Then began the real work.

The stated mission of the Pathways program is “to provide emerging athletes with a well-defined route and the foundation needed for international achievement. It prioritizes transparency, collaboration, and education, aiming to promote not only athletic success but also personal growth.”

The first step was reorganizing the various U19 and U23 camps. Today, all camps are under the purview of high performance, not just the selection camps. Selection camps have been streamlined to handle fewer athletes. In the past, over 40 athletes might be invited, and once selections were made, coaches didn’t have time for those who missed the cut. So they floundered or were sent to train at a club for the last few weeks of the summer season. Now, the selection development camps fill this gap.

The SDC’s focus entirely on development. Rowers train exclusively in small boats with almost no line-up selection. They will not compete outside of camp, foregoing club nationals or Canadian Henley in favor of an in-house speed order in singles and pairs. On the junior level, SDC high performers may be invited to stay on for selection camp (complete with scholarship), which begins July 10, the day after SDC concludes in Chula Vista, Calif.

The program is expanding to include a U19 youth-development camp. These camps are even more fundamental. Designed for the newest athletes in the sport, the YDC’s will focus on building foundational skills and fostering a love for the sport over the pressure of competition.

This, says Chris Chase, USRowing’s director of sport development, is crucial to building the foundation of international success.

“We don’t move boats like, say, the Europeans do. We row bigger boats and we lose some of the feel of the water. We have to get a more cohesive unit of how we train our juniors across the country,” he said when the Pathways program was introduced.

A series of off-season identification (ID) and winter camps for both U19 and U23 athletes is planned for this year and will expand in the future. The aim: to survey this vast country to identify, educate, and encourage future elite competitors.

This is where another focus of Pathways comes into play—creating the infrastructure for long-term success, which is currently lacking. At the most fundamental level, this means accurate and ongoing athlete-data collection from a standardized battery of tests.

All athletes are required to input their data and test results in their member portal on the USRowing website. This, Gorman emphasized, is the most important factor in making Pathways successful. It will allow athletes to apply for all camps and, crucially, allow coaches to track their development.

This approach differs in some fundamental ways from some other countries, which tend to take a more proactive approach in monitoring athletes. Rowing Australia, for example, has regular calls with U.S. college coaches and even periodically visits dozens of programs stateside to check in on Australian athletes they already know about and identify promising ones they don’t

“How our athletes improve over time is our biggest marker of success,” Gorman said. “We need to see athletes progressing as they get older, as they go to our various camps on their way to the National Team.”

Unlike in the past, the data will roll over from year to year, creating a centralized repository for all athlete information.

Verdonkschot has reinforced this message through the testing he’s instituted at all levels. Whether at an U19 ID camp, the U23 selection camp, or training with the senior team, all athletes in each age group will complete periodically the same  battery of tests: lactate testing to establish appropriate training zones; a movement screen to assess deficiencies and prevent injuries; and “profiling,” which is similar to conventional erg tests of 6K, 2K, one minute, and 100 meters. The test data will be analyzed over months and years to track progress and assess the effectiveness of the program on a national scale.

These are not designed to be tests in the traditional sense, Verdonkschot insists.

“The essence of lactate testing, for example, is not so much how you compare to other people. It can be a guidance or a tool to look at your training and to see how your training is working and whether it’s effective or not.”

To that end, Verdonkschot has developed a comprehensive document titled “USRowing Talent Characteristics.”  Shared at last year’s RowCon and distributed since to interested athletes and coaches, the chart outlines the ideal progress for all rowers, male and female, heavyweight and lightweight, from U19 to elite. For example, it outlines the expected progression for openweight female rowers from 7:18 to 6:35 on their 2K. It specifies also other means and measurements of improvement, such as ideal weekly and yearly training volume, and one-rep maximums for the squat, deadlift, and bench pull.

This standardization of expectations across genders and age groups is unprecedented at the national level and fulfills what both Verdonkschot and Gorman identify as pillars of Pathway—clear communication and transparency.

The next challenge is achieving another key tenet of the program: education through information-sharing and collaboration. Educating athletes and especially their coaches who are not training under the USRowing system throughout the academic year is a work in progress.

“We need to educate a lot better on everything from appropriate lifting to appropriate volume,” Chase said in a webinar. “We have to educate a lot more [coaches] to send up athletes who are ready to go, who can move boats, who are going to be healthy, aren’t going to have overuse injuries, aren’t going to have burnout. And we’ve got a lot to do to meet those ends.”

Gorman takes responsibility for educating junior, college, and club coaches so they can support the development of their rowers within Pathways.

“Everybody wants to see their athletes progress,” Gorman said. “If they don’t know how to train an athlete properly, it’s because we’re not providing the resources to teach them.”

Intrinsic to the process is USRowing’s certification levels for coaches, who will be invited also to join webinars specific to their athletes.

“We’ll say, ‘You had an athlete who was invited to this camp, and we did this testing. Come to this webinar where we’re going to tell you what this testing means.’”

Such follow-up will allow athletes, under their coach’s guidance, to work with the information gained from Pathways testing to inform their training zones and address deficiencies.

With a program this extensive, it can be difficult to define success. Of course, Olympic medals are the ultimate and most obvious goal. The medal count is also how the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee allocates funding, making it a strategic necessity. But true success is more complex. Gorman will be taking a nuanced approach to evaluating performances by individual crews and coaches, tracking those able to outperform their expected finish at the world championships based on training paces before competition.

In five years, after the Los Angeles Olympics, Gorman hopes to have all the Pathways systems in place. That means building a method of athlete-data collection (already under way through the member portal) that athletes update habitually, thus enabling simple and ongoing identification and monitoring. That means creating a timeline of all camps scheduled two years in advance. That means creating coaching cohorts, with coaches cycling in and out of varying levels of involvement and less of an all-in or all-out approach.

For Gorman, ultimate success is that in 10 years “I’m not needed anymore.”

Already, there have been some early structural wins. This is the earliest ever that the selection-camp dates, locations, and coaches have been named, Gorman says. On the U23 level, for example, the 2024 camp information was available online by Nov. 15. For the 2023 camps, the information was announced last March, four months later in the cycle.

Another early win has been the creation of the U19 high-performance winter camps. These two four-day camps in Chula Vista focus on small-boat rowing, education, and physiological testing, the same testing regimen outlined earlier, and represent the first time U19 athletes have participated in the same evaluations as senior-team athletes. This opportunity to connect with, educate, and evaluate athletes during the academic year when they’re training with their home clubs or schools never existed before.

For the Pathway program to be successful long term, U19 and U23 athletes and coaches need to take an active role. The onus is on them to get involved in the system, and USRowing coaches will be conducting limited in-person outreach. Gorman and Verdonkschot implore athletes to log in to their member portals and update their athlete profiles. They invite coaches to participate in webinars, apply for camp coaching positions and other support roles, and reach out directly to them with questions, ideas, or simply to visit and watch a practice. The door is open, and collaboration is invited.

Meanwhile, Gorman is taking the long view.

“The biggest thing is patience. This is going to take time. But every year, we will get better.”