Family Stone

August 28, 2011

Gevvie Stone is unsure exactly when she had to set her coach straight.

It could have been when she was competing in the single at the 2010 national selection regatta. Or it could have been later that year when she was trying to earn a spot on the national team as the United States women’s single sculler at the senior national team selection trials.

But either way, her coach’s pre-race pep talk had the same result.

“Just before I would shove, he would say, ‘No matter what happens, I love you.’ It really made me mad. That’s like the worst pep talk you could ever give someone. I don’t have any interest in not winning. It was the worst pep talk in the world,” Stone said.

“So we did have a talk about that,” she said. “I told him, ‘Dad you’ve got to cut that out’.”

It might have been “the worst pep talk,” but it did nothing to change the relationship between Stone, who is representing the United States at the 2011 World Rowing Championships in the single in Slovenia and her coach-father, Gregg, who in 1979 was in the exact same place doing the exact same thing – rowing the single for the U.S. national team at the world championships.

Every morning and afternoon this week, father Stone could be seen leading the way on his bicycle along the path that rings Lake Bled to the boatyard with daughter Gevvie right behind. And while the route from the team hotel to the boatyard is no more than a 10-minute ride, the journey for father and daughter to Bled has taken over two years, and thousands of miles.

The ride began in 2008, when the Olympic rowing team was selected and Gevvie’s name was not on the list. After a year of training, she had been cut from the Princeton, New Jersey, USRowing Training Center and went home to Newtown, Mass.

She had plans to attend Tufts University Medical School and those plans did not include rowing. That’s when her father stepped in, ever so gently.

“When she did not make the Beijing team, after spending a year training with the team, she came back to Boston fairly discouraged and was set to go to med school,” Gregg Stone said. “I suggested that she just row her single, get it out, and just row it. It was a good thing to do while she was in med school. She would get her rhythm back and I thought she could be fast.”

The Stones are a rowing family.

Both Gregg and his wife, Lisa, rowed for the United States and both have rowed on Lake Bled. Lisa was Gevvie’s coach in high school and Gregg took Gevvie out sculling whenever he could.

“We were reasonably close and when she was a little kid, we would row in the double together,” said Gregg. “And when she was at Princeton and on vacation, we would row together in the double.”

So Gregg felt comfortable that the single would be good for his daughter.

Gevvie listened and before packing her bags for New Hampshire for the summer, she got out her single.

“I brought my single up, but I didn’t row it that much,” she said. “I swam and biked and ran and stayed away from it.”

Gregg said he kept his distance and let his daughter work through her feelings, but kept prodding her to row. He suggested that she train for the Head of the Charles that fall of 2008 and when she came home to Boston, father and daughter rowed together from their base at the Cambridge Boat Club in Boston.

It was exactly what was needed. Gevvie rowed in the afternoons on her own, finding herself and her desire. On the weekends, father and daughter would go somewhere and race.

“He encouraged me to go out and train for the Head of the Charles and that’s what we did,” she said. “We rowed in a regatta almost every weekend leading up to it. It was fun. It was relaxing. There was no one coaching. I was just going out in the afternoon by myself and then on weekends we would do something together.

“And he kind of let me find my speed again, while being encouraging. He really pointed me in the right direction.”

Stone won Boston’s prestigious fall regatta and found her desire again. “That was the momentum I needed to continue to train seriously.”

Today Stone raced her in her first senior world championship in exactly the same place her father rowed 32 years ago. She finished third in her heat behind New Zealand’s Emma Twigg and New Zealand’s Freda Svensson, and will now row in a repechage on Wednesday.

Watching her race here, Gregg Stone’s thoughts are centered on helping Gevvie perform. He focuses on what she does technically and they talk strategy. And it reminds him of when he was rowing the single for the U.S. in a very tough field of European rowers.

“There are very few dad thoughts,” he said. “There are empathy thoughts, though. When she goes out and races Karsten and Knapkova, who are really good, I think of my single sculling races when I got crushed by (Perrtti Karpinnin) and (Peter-Michael Kolbe).

“This is a tough league. Most nations put their best athletes in the single. We have our best athletes in the eight, and so that means whoever is in the single is working against a challenge.”

But he is also a very proud dad.

“The whole thing of her being in a single is really close to me, because I love the single,” he said. “I understand it. I know how to move the single, how to think about a single, how to prepare for races.

“It’s great fun and it’s a privilege,” he said. “A lot of us coach our children when they are young in soccer and hockey and whatnot, but to get to coach a child in a sport that you actually know reasonably well, and at this level, is a rare privilege and it’s been a lot of fun.”

And about his pre-race “I love you no matter what happens” talk?

“I’m still trying not to say it.”

Ed Moran

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