They followed her into the dark last Thursday night. Forced to practice after sunset due to a conflict of schedules, the Syracuse women’s rowing team had no other choice. They had to trust Tina Campagna’s dark brown eyes, with their backs faced against the current.

‘You can’t see what’s going on,’ said Kris Sanford, head coach of Syracuse’s women’s rowing team. ‘(A night practice) is very quiet. It’s very peaceful.’

For the senior coxswain, the conditions were perfect. No turbulence, wind or bitter cold. Just an opportunity to break the silence from the stern, through the mic sticking out from beneath her cap.

So she did what she always did. She just spoke.

‘I don’t remember saying anything in particular,’ she recalled. ‘I was happy, and we saw that everything we had been working for, it does come together.’

Campagna expects the same connected atmosphere when the Orange rowing team faces Pennsylvania and Northeastern this Saturday on the Charles River in Boston, Mass., to compete for the annual Orange Cup Challenge. The Syracuse men’s crew team races today and tomorrow at the 21st George Washington Invitational Regatta to defend its Ten Eyck Cup in Washington, D.C.

Guiding her team is natural for Campagna, who guides her crew through her Cox Box, a battery-powered amplifier that allows her to communicate to her teammates. It’s been her role ever since she first stumbled onto rowing at SU.

‘I really had no idea what rowing was, me and my friends just saw it in a rowing magazine,’ she said. ‘I was 4-foot-11, so I realized that I was the perfect size to be a coxswain, and then once I got in the seat, I just kept doing it.’

In fact, Campagna doesn’t consider herself a rower, not only because she doesn’t physically row, but because she has a different perspective. Facing forward down the stretch of the water, she can see what other rowers can’t.

‘I’m their eyes,’ Campagna said, ‘I can see to the right, to the left, ahead. So I can see everything, and as opposed to a bow seat who can see everything but can’t do anything, I have a chance to speak.’

Christine DePompeo sometimes wishes for her own microphone. From the bow, or front, of the boat, DePompeo can’t change a rower’s stroke mid-race or motivate a teammate like Campagna, who shares her coach’s words with others.

‘She’s a bit of the coach on the boat,’ Sanford said. ‘The coxswain’s role is always really important, because her No. 1 job is to steer straight.’

And her role on the Varsity Eight has become rightfully hers. As a leader and an organized teammate, she’s earned her captaincy, Sanford said.

She’s the first coxswain to be a captain on the team in four years, and it’s changed her role on the team, but not on the water, DePompeo said.

‘She just kind of stepped into the role of an informant, but once she gets in the water she’s just back to, ‘I’m your coxswain, you’re my rower.”

Campagna sees herself as an intermediate between the coach and her rowers. When rowers row, Campagna said she has to worry about the head games.

She wants to be that coxswain who gets into her opponents head, the one who can motivate her teammates to row faster and to better understand the rowers on her Varsity Eight boat.

‘Just changing my calls around, reacting differently to what they do and to see if I can say something that will make them row faster,’ Campagna said.

But, when speaking to the crew, Campagna does what she always does.

‘We go through the race plan, talk about where we are during a race, or where the other boats are,’ Campagna said. ‘Oh, and I just talked about putting everything on the line.’

edpaik@syr.edu

Published on April 10, 2008 at 12:00 pm