By Terry Glavin
High-school rowing teams often forge strong bonds among young people and, nearly as often, their families.
Organizing road trips to regattas, often with younger children in tow, parents augment the small coaching staff, feed voracious athletes, and share the emotions of victory and defeat. If they see a need, they fill it quickly.
When freshman Sean Bamman went out for the rowing team in 1989 at what was then called Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Va., his needs were great.
Bamman had a season of rowing experience and good grades. But his single mother was a high-school dropout who had given birth to him when she was 15 and later became a heroin addict. Until he ran away to his grandmother’s home when he was in ninth grade, Bamman had moved with his mother from one crummy apartment and seedy motel to another, when they weren’t living in a car. For a college essay, he counted the places they had lived. He stopped at 43.
“It’s weird, because a lot of people describe the water of the Potomac as being rather choppy and chaotic,” Bamman said. “But to me, it was kind of like this safe haven from all the crap I was dealing with.
“It was magical.”
Although Bamman thought he was hiding his situation well, he was self-conscious and feared people were scrutinizing him for signs he was poor and parentless. His situation must have been obvious to anyone who cared to look; neither his mother nor grandmother ever attended any of his rowing events.
“A lot of the team, the team’s families, kind of adopted me in different ways,” he said.
Unbeknownst to him until much later, an anonymous family was paying his rowing fees and regatta travel expenses— costs he assumed his grandmother was covering. A teammate’s mother found him jobs that provided spending money for clothes and other things kids in normal situations enjoy.
In his junior year, when his grandmother lost a job and had to move out of the school district, Bamman lived with a teammate’s family so he could continue to attend and row at W-L.
“There were other families, too, that were from the team who would provide for me in the nicest ways, like, ‘Hey Sean, I’ve got this extra pair of shoes. They don’t fit me. Do you want them? I can’t return them.’ You know, in a way that didn’t hurt your pride.
“So, it was a village, and it was a very supportive group, and I am again very fortunate to have had the friends and teammates and their families who did look after us.”
Because his grandmother lived nearly all her life in Arlington, it remained home base despite the many moves. The strong bonds formed on the team and the lifelong nature of the sport have helped keep many former teammates and W-L alumni in touch.
Arlington, and W-L in particular, have a long and distinguished rowing history, dating to 1949 when Charlie Butt began building his legend as founder and coach of the W-L rowing team. During the 41 years he coached, W-L varsity eights won the Princess Elizabeth Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta two times as well as many national championships.
“We had a really good freshman eight,” whose members included Michael Callahan, later an Olympic rower and today the head coach of the immensely successful men’s rowing program at the University of Washington. “There was a good energy to the team then, from varsity down to freshmen, and we had a lot of good wins and a lot of fun,” Bamman said.
Butt, an MIT graduate and engineer with the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, coached until 1991, when he retired because of acute leukemia, from which he died the following year. His son, Charley Butt, is the Bolles-Parker Head Coach for Harvard Men’s Heavyweight Crew. In addition to coaching, he was instrumental in creating the rowing facility at the Occoquan Reservoir and devoted much of his energy late in life to establishing a boathouse on the Arlington side of the Potomac.
At the time, the W-L team was rowing out of the century-old Potomac Boat Club, with its walls of photographs of winning teams and famous rowers. Bamman, who lives in Arlington today, continues to row with Potomac.
It was there that in June 2024 he spoke with Nancy Butt Packard, one of Coach Butt’s daughters, and learned that the boathouse effort, an idea he’d heard about when he was a high school rower, was making quiet progress. Nancy Butt is a director of the Arlington Boathouse Foundation (ABF) that was formed in 1991 to fulfill Coach Butt’s vision. Last December, Bamman joined the ABF board to lead its fundraising campaign.
Since its founding, the all-volunteer ABF has been grinding through the regulatory process, seeking approval from multiple jurisdictions, advisory councils, and agencies, even as the need for a new boathouse—obvious in Coach Butt’s time—has grown with the local population and the surging popularity of rowing.
Arlington is walled off from nearby water by the George Washington Memorial Parkway, completed in 1932. As a result, rowers and other water-sports enthusiasts in Virginia must cross to the Washington, D.C., side of the Potomac to launch their boats.
“Arlington County does not have a single access point to the Potomac River,” Bamman said. “The Arlington County Boathouse would be that access point. Having this one boathouse would all of a sudden open it up to 800 acres of what we could call green space or water space.”
On the D.C. side are the Thompson Boat Center, dedicated in 1961, and the Potomac Boat Club (PBC), established in 1869. Farther away are the Anacostia Community Boathouse on the Anacostia River and the Dee Campbell Rowing Center, in Alexandria, Va., south of Arlington County. None of these facilities has the capacity to handle the increasing number of young athletes the sport has attracted in recent years, said Lena Wang, PBC president and a lifelong Arlington resident who rowed for Wakefield High School there as well as with a PBC junior program when the club hosted them.
These facilities house multiple clubs and high-school programs, and “there is no room for a school or club to grow due to the limited rack space,” she said, not to mention the fees charged by the corporate owners.
The Thompson Boat Center is home to 13 high-school crews, two college teams, and two masters programs, all of which store their equipment and launch from there.
Washington-Liberty High School, as W-L is known now, keeps its boats currently at Columbia Island Marina, on the Pentagon Lagoon and accessed from the Virginia side of the river even though it’s part of the District of Columbia. Columbia Island, next door to the Pentagon and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, has no boathouse, and the W-L boats are stored there on roofless racks. The marina is managed by Boating in D.C. under a concession agreement with the National Park Service.
W-L’s rowing program moved out of PBC in late 2024 after the needs of the club and the youth program began to conflict.
Ground for the Arlington Boathouse won’t be broken for a while, but several developments represent great progress, said Paul Holland, ABF president since the middle of 2024 and a board member for almost 20 years.
“Recent developments—including Arlington County’s adding the project to its 10-year capital-improvement plan, an agreement between ABF and the Arlington Community Foundation, and ABF’s commitment to raising $2 million in support of the project—are very exciting,” Holland said. A senior program analyst with Reston-based Leidos, the defense industry’s largest IT services provider, Holland rowed starboard to his twin brother’s port for W-L before rowing as a Princeton heavyweight.
As part of its agreement with ABF, the Arlington Community Foundation will handle private donations, enabling the boathouse foundation to receive larger tax-deductible contributions.
The venture has been complicated by a lack of waterfront land and the tangle of overlapping jurisdictions involved, including Arlington County, the National Park Service, and the District of Columbia (overseen by Congress).
In 2018, after considering possible sites, the Park Service chose a slice of waterfront just north of the channel between Arlington and Roosevelt Island. Plans call for a 14,000-square-foot boathouse and a 300-foot-long floating dock.
The boathouse and dock will occupy the so-called “lower site,” a small area wedged between the parkway and the river. A building with locker rooms, showers, bathrooms and service-vehicle parking will be situated at the “upper site,” out of the flood plain and on the other side of the parkway. That property of two-thirds of an acre is owned by Arlington County. The two sites will be connected by an existing pedestrian bridge.
An agreement for the use of the sites was signed in 2019 with Arlington County, the National Park Service, the National Capital Planning Commission, the D.C. State Historic Preservation Office, and the Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. The agreement gives the county until 2029 to complete the lower site.
While the plans do not include on-site parking, hundreds of spaces are available in parking garages in the Rosslyn central business district, half a mile or so from the lower boathouse site. The site also is less than a 10-minute walk from the Rosslyn Metro station, which connects with three lines. It’s also adjacent to a bike path and hiking trail.
The estimated cost of the lower site: $15 million (split 60-40 county and private funds).
In 1992, Arlington County voters approved a $1-million bond issue for the early stages of the project. In November 2022, Arlington residents approved a bond issue of $2.93 million for planning the boathouse, part of a larger budget item for park-related capital projects. The county’s capital-improvement plan for fiscal years 2025 to 2034 calls for $9.6 million in boathouse funding in fiscal year 2028, but the Arlington County Board will have to ask voters to approve that bond issue.
Said ABF President Holland, “I am optimistic the project will be completed and we will be rowing out of the facility in the early 2030s.”
“After decades of advocacy and planning, this boathouse is long overdue” said Jay Fisette, a supporter of the project when he was an Arlington County commissioner from 1998 to 2017. “The use of the Potomac River for non-motorized boats benefits everyone who wants to exercise in nature–especially our young adults.
“Let’s get this done.”
Bamman graduated from W-L and the University of Virginia, where he had a need-based scholarship. He rowed at first with UVA’s club team but realized he wanted to concentrate on his studies. At UVA, he made connections that helped him found a successful company that provides real-estate, zoning, permitting, and engineering services for wireless carriers. He and his wife have four children, including two sons who show signs already that they share their dad’s love of rowing.
He’s glad to help push the Arlington Boathouse over the finish line for the county and the sport.
“It’s like rowing—it kind of recharges me. I think not only of the connection I have with Charlie and his vision but also the future of rowing in the area and how much Arlington County has given me.
“The three primary high schools that row are rowing out of three different locations, and we need them to row under one roof. There’s such a great need because all the other places are at or beyond capacity and with expiration dates. New facilities are going to open rowing to the next generation.
“Rowing and Arlington gave me so much opportunity. To go from basically nothing to where I am now—working on this project some 30 years later—is like coming full circle.”
How you can help: Donations toward the boathouse project can be made via the Arlington Community Foundation’s website. Further information about donations is available from the Arlington Boathouse Foundation’s website arlingtonboathouse.org or by contacting Sean Bamman at sean.bamman@arlingtonboathouse.org.
