Natalie Dell: Big Fish From a Small Pond

February 21, 2012

Growing up on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, Natalie Dell had plenty of opportunities to experience what it was like to be cold. Farms tend to be like that in the winter.

But then she decided to row at Penn State University. The thing about that was, Penn State might spend a lot of money on football, but not on rowing. Dell’s team was a club sport. They rowed in old boats on a 700-meter body of water called Stone Valley Lake.

“It was really a pond,” said Dell, and they couldn’t afford a dock.

“I thought I knew what it was like to be cold,” Dell said. “We had to walk our boats into the water, even in the beginning of March and late November. I thought I knew what cold was, until I was wet docking, getting ready for the Frostbite Regatta in Philly.”

Penn Sate contributed something like five percent of the team’s budget and the girls supplied the rest, paying $1,000 a year to row.

“We received nothing for free. We designed and paid for our uniforms and our team was run by students.” And because she was not exposed to rowing in high school, “I didn’t know anything about the under 23 team, or junior national team. (Collegiate rowing) was all we knew.”

But that didn’t stop Penn State or Dell, who turned 27 this month. In 2006, her team went undefeated and then won at the Dad Vail Regatta in Philadelphia, no small feat for a club program. But while the experience was fulfilling for Dell and her teammates, seeing what other programs had, left her feeling a little left out. Dell calls it “feeling a little bitter.”

But that was a good thing, because Dell knew she wanted more from the sport and turned that into energy and drive.

“When I started training after college, I figured out how to harness the character that I built coming from a club program, and I think it has taken me much further I had gone a different path.”

She started sculling during summers in Philadelphia and Washington and when she went to graduate school at Boston University, she signed on with the Riverside Boat Club and set her sights on the national team.

Dell was lucky on two fronts. She was training with good coaches under Tom and Liane Keister at Riverside and when she graduated from BU with a Masters in Public Health, a school advisor guided her towards a job with the Department of Veteran’s Affairs. They not only had a job for her as a research manager on a project studying the effects of post traumatic stress disorder and depression in veterans, they gave her the flexibility to work the kind of hours that would support her training and her goals of rowing on the national team.

It took a while, but after a few experiences of getting beaten at national selection events – “it took a couple of tries. I got beat a lot” – she did well in 2010 and was invited to come to train at the USRowing Training Center in Princeton, N.J.

And it all worked out. Dell made her first senior team rowing in the quadruple sculls in 2010, and then again in the quad in 2011, where she won a silver medal at the world championships on Lake Bled, Slovenia.

Today, she continues to work for Veteran’s Affairs on the same project and is training full time with the national team in the hope that she will row in the 2012 Olympic Games this summer in London.

“Success changes a lot of things,” Dell said. “After the medal at worlds, I can understand why people would do this for three cycles. When you start to do well and see all your hard work pay off, it’s hard to think of this coming to an end.”

SHORT STROKES

Dell was born in Silver Springs, Md. and grew up in Clearville, Pa…She graduated from Penn State in 2007 with a Bachelor of Arts degree . . . she lists her hobbies as motorcycle riding, but doesn’t have her little Honda Rebel anymore “it was a pretty small, girly bike. I was afraid to go anywhere over 40 miles an hours. And when I was invited to come train in Princeton, I had to whittle my possessions down to what fit in my car”…If there was one thing her teammates would say about Dell that only they know, it is her capacity to eat copious amounts of food, “I’m like the snack bar when we’re on the water. If someone gets hungry in the boat, they know who to go to” . . . And if there is one thing Dell would say about her journey so far, it would be directed to other athletes rowing in college club programs, “If I could put one message out there, it would be, if you are a club rower, from an unfunded or smaller D3 or D2 program, even though it might take you a little bit longer to get to where you want to go, if it’s something that you truly want, then stick with it, because it’s something you can make happen.”

Ed Moran

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