Twenty Seven Years Strong!

The McLean Crew Club promotes, supports, and operates the rowing program at McLean High School. The program annually involves about 80 student athletes and is recognized for its top-quality coaching staff, its dedicated athletes, and its success in local, regional, and national competitions.  McLean Crew athletes also are outstanding students who are strongly committed to academics: the discipline and time-management skills needed to become an outstanding athlete often translate into excellence in schoolwork.

In the fall of 1996, a small group of McLean High School parents and students took on the totally self-funded project of forming the club.  These energetic and forward-thinking people (including original board members Donald M. Farmer, Joan Dunn, Alex Nikol, and Linda Walsh) borrowed equipment and found a volunteer coach: former scholastic rower, Chris Gordon, who had more recently been the head coach for the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill varsity women's team.  That spring, the team set out on the Potomac River under the McLean Crew Club banner.

By 1999, the club, still a band of volunteer parents and committed student-athletes, was ready to venture beyond the National Capital Area regatta circuit and entered its first Stotesbury Cup regatta on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  In the spring of 2000, using leased and borrowed equipment, McLean Crew had obtained varsity status and was ready to leave its mark on the national rowing landscape.  The team has since won many medals in prestigious events over the years and has produced athletes who moved on to compete in national championships, world championships and the Olympic Games.  A full record of those accomplishments can be viewed on this site's Awards Page. 

In some team sports, play often focuses on an individual player, like when a football quarterback throws for a touchdown or a soccer forward kicks for a goal.  But in crew, it’s always about the team working together as a single unit, like a perfectly tuned machine.  If you value teamwork and cooperation above individual stardom, crew may be just the sport for you!  Rowing gives an athlete a great workout on both the upper and lower body, and is a low-impact exercise.

McLean Crew rowers have gone on to experience continuing scholastic and athletic success in college. Graduates of the program have attended or are now attending the University of Delaware, Georgetown University, James Madison University, Marietta College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  Michigan State University, Temple University, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the University of Tennessee, the University of Virginia, the University of Washington, the University of Wisconsin, the U.S. Naval Academy,  the United States Military Academy (West Point), Washington State University, Yale University, and other well-known schools.