Randolph High School in Massachusetts has its first recognised crew team, and it all started with a summer reading list. Arshay Cooper's memoir, A Most Beautiful Thing, about the first all-Black high school rowing team in America, was assigned to the district's students in 2023. A little over a year after the club formed, rowing is now an official school sport.
The book was put forward by Susan Lane, the school librarian, who has since become the team's coach. A committee approved it in 2023.
"Some of our students have their own troubles, and I felt that they could relate to some of his experiences," Lane told The Boston Globe.
Lane invited Cooper to speak at the school. Afterwards, he supplied five ergs and funded a trip to the Head of the Charles. Through A Most Beautiful Thing Inclusion Fund, the non-profit he founded in 2020, he also arranged free coaching at Watuppa Rowing Center in Fall River.
"It's the right group," Cooper said. "A lot of talent, but not a lot of access and opportunity."
A crew takes shape
The five-strong squad comprises three juniors, a freshman and a sophomore. At school, they stretch, train with weights and learn rowing terms alongside Lane, a former swimming coach who had never rowed. Nearly every week they take an hour-long bus ride to Watuppa Pond for their water sessions.
Freshman Antoine McKoy, 13, joined this year on the advice of his friend Ethan Cohen. "I like being on the water," he said. "Learning balance is very important; so the boat doesn't tip over."
Cohen, a 16-year-old sophomore who switched from track and field last year, found the workouts harder than he expected. He plans to keep going and recruit more friends. "It's exciting and strange," he said. "I used to be nervous talking to people. I'm less nervous now."
"It's incredibly difficult to get schools to buy into a new sport," said Jeffrey Soares, Watuppa's director of rowing. "So for this school, which is in a landlocked town that has no former rowing experience, with a librarian who had never rowed before, to just be so inspired to create a rowing program indoors, is an incredible testament."
The fund behind it
Watuppa, founded in 2018 as Bay Coast Rowing Center, offers free year-round rowing to young people aged 12 and over on South Watuppa Pond in Fall River, with its 1,550 acres of non-tidal water. In September 2025 the Inclusion Fund named it one of four new partner programmes, which shared $100,000 in direct support plus Concept2 ergs and oars. Across its national network, the fund had donated $625,000, 19 boats, 234 ergs and more than 96 oars to 23 partner programmes between 2021 and September 2025.
"They knew nothing about rowing, but they believed in the dream of what it could be," said Jennifer Ceolinski, the fund's programme manager. The fund now hopes to repeat the Randolph model at a high school in New Jersey.
The documentary of Cooper's book reached screens in 2020. At the time he told Row360 that on the water his crew "couldn't hear the sound of sirens or bullets, and that allowed us to shape a different vision for ourselves, of who and what we could become."
