STROKE OF BRILLIANCE: Princeton University women’s lightweight rower Cate Barry stroking the Tiger varsity eight in a race this season. Barry enjoyed a stellar junior season this spring for the Tigers, helping the varsity eight to win its grand final at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association (IRA) National Championships and later getting named as the Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association (CRCA) Lightweight Athlete of the Year for a second straight season. (Photo by Row2K, provided courtesy of Princeton Athletics)
By Justin Feil
Cate Barry was named the Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association Lightweight Athlete of the Year on Friday.
Again.
And the two-time award winner still has another year to go at Princeton University, where the rising senior hopes to help the Tigers lightweight women’s crew program win a sixth straight national championship.
It all seems so predictable, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Every step of her rowing career has brought a challenge, and this year’s season started with some questions for the Tigers after they lost the season opener to rival Harvard-Radcliffe before gaining speed and cohesion to place first again in the grand final at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association (IRA) National Championships on May 31 on Lake Natoma in Gold River, Calif.
“There’s something really rewarding about winning that race when you know maybe if you had that race a few weeks earlier, the outcome wouldn’t have been the same,” said Barry. “So it really was all that training and that preparation was critical for us. And it wasn’t just kind of like keeping doing the same things and going along with the same training.”
Barry and the Tigers aren’t resting on their laurels. Though there’s no place to go up for either, they are constantly striving. They will have a new boat make-up, and they can always strive to improve even segments of their racing to go faster overall.
“We talk about this a lot as a boat and as a program because we’ve had so much success in the past few years so sometimes it kind of just feels like winning is kind of just what’s expected,” said Barry. “And then it kind of becomes pressure, more of pressure not to lose rather than the will to win. And it’s something that we try and not fall into that trap, because sometimes I think it’s just about your mindset. You can still be excited about every victory.”
Barry’s path to crew stardom hasn’t been predictable. Although she had an older sister, Ella, who was an accomplished rower for the Princeton open women’s team, up through Barry’s freshman year of high school her passion was ice hockey. She was on the typical path to potentially play hockey in college when she enrolled in boarding school in her first year of high school. The COVID pandemic hit in the spring of that school year.
“I came home early and then just kind of needed to do something to work out,” said Barry, a native of Oyster Bay, N.Y. “I couldn’t play hockey because it’s not socially distant. So I really actually started doing ERG (ergometer) workouts in my basement with my sister on Zoom with her rowing team and her coach.”
Amadeusz Pietrzak, the coach at the Oak Neck Rowing Academy, saw potential in Barry, leading her to make a complete athletic 180 change to rowing.
“I just stopped playing hockey, which is just crazy because I played since I was like 5 years old,” said Barry. “But I just really, really enjoyed it.”
Through high school, Barry only rowed in single and double sculls. She stood out as a nationally accomplished rower, but when she arrived at Princeton, it was the first time she’d ever had a coxswain in her boat when she was put into the lightweight eight boat.
“I almost felt like a novice again because it was the same sport that I’d always done through all of high school and I’d had a lot of success in and I knew really well, but then all of a sudden I didn’t know it that well,” said Barry. “And I was not used to having a coxswain. I didn’t know how to row with the sweep board. I remember being so confused. I just got thrown into the boat on the first practice, which is honestly great and the best way to learn.”
The Tigers could see her potential too. She broke the program’s 5K record in the fall of her freshman year, and sat in the four seat in the middle of the boat as they helped Princeton win their third straight national title. Then came a change for her in her second season as she moved to the stroke seat, right in front of the coxswain as a sophomore. The stroke sets the rhythm and pace for the boat, and she’s now done that for the Tigers in back-to-back seasons.
“I love being in stroke,” said Barry. “I think there’s definitely some responsibility that comes with it that makes me nervous.”
What’s proven reassuring to her is understanding that her teammates trust her. With her back to the rest of the boat, Barry pictures each of them before a race. It brings her confidence in the boat and her job.
“She’s amazing,” said Princeton assistant coach Kate McFetridge. “She lifts everybody up. She’s just so steady and she provides a lot of stability for varsity.”
The team recognized Barry’s ability again last winter. She broke the program’s 2K record heading into the spring season, and the Tigers celebrated together.
“I was very excited,” said Barry. “I give credit to my teammates for every success I have, whether it’s an individual thing like a 2K on the ERG, or I’m physically in the boat with them, just because my teammates are so talented and they’re always there pushing me, supporting me. And I just would not have had the improvement and the trajectory I’ve had without having them next to me, sitting next to me on the ERG standing behind me.”
The togetherness provided vital all year, particularly after Princeton lost to Harvard-Radcliffe in the first race of the year. All of a sudden, the Tigers were No. 2 nationally and they stayed there for most of the season. Until it mattered most.
“The key there is acknowledging, yes, we definitely want to win, but keeping them really focused on the day-to-day,” said McFetridge. “Because I feel like when you are just focusing on outcome, you don’t execute.”
The loss in the fall pushed the Tigers to work all that harder through the winter. Their focus was always on improving individually and as a team. After losing by six seconds in the opener, Princeton beat Harvard-Radcliffe by a little over a second at Eastern Sprints. That afforded them some confidence going into nationals, but their gold medal was hardly a given.
“We’re operating on small margins,” said Barry. “But we definitely continued to find more speed through our training. I think even just our other races, we were building confidence. We changed our race plans a little bit, practiced them. We executed it pretty well when we went to Stanford and then again when we raced Georgetown and then I think Sprints was a big moment for us because that was when we realized we definitely can beat this Radcliffe boat.”
That confidence was more important and productive than the underlying pressure to not to be the first year to lose the national championship. This year’s eight won the national championship race by almost four seconds over Radcliffe.
It was “a celebration of all the hard work that we had put in,” said McFetridge. “They had worked a lot and had put in a lot of meters and so I think it was easy for them to have a vision and feel capable because they were so capable. They had earned that feeling and it wasn’t just because ladies had done it in years past.”
The mindset will be the same coming back. Princeton will have a new look this fall, a new starting point for another year in which they hope to finish on top, and McFetridge is confident that she has young women ready to step up. And as Princeton showed, it’s not where you start.
Or how you start. Barry is proof of that. It’s been a steep learning curve to get from working out on an ERG on the side in high school to becoming a two-time CRCA Lightweight Athlete of the Year at Princeton.
“The first few weeks were tricky, but then I think once you get it, you start to get it,” said Barry. “I did a lot of work in the tanks with my coach, which was good to help practice and learn. I think also just maybe when I take a step back and look at a lot of the stuff that I’ve achieved, I am proud of it and it’s pretty amazing, but I think day-to-day I’m just like, what’s practice gonna look like today and it’s just take it one day at a time, one race at a time, one thing at a time, and then I think the success starts to just kind of follow from that.”