When Emily Bogdan rows, rows, rows her boat, she isn't going gently down the stream. And her facial expression is generally anything but merry.

The Ellicott City high schooler races for the Baltimore Rowing Club, and recently was part of the largest team the club has ever sent to the USRowing Youth National Championships Regatta at Hersha Lake, Ohio.

Bogdan and her partner, Allie Plaut, didn't win. But they did well enough to make it to the finals, and just to get there was an accomplishment.

"It was a cold, rainy day in New Jersey," said one of their coaches, Aly Covino, about the qualifying races the duo did, which were part of the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic District Championship Regatta, in West Windsor, N.J. "But not a single person from BRC could feel the weather conditions.

What members felt was elation, when five members (two duos and a single) qualified for the Ohio contest. The previous year, said Covino, only one member qualified.

Bogdan, a rising junior at Centennial High School, said she started rowing in northern Virginia, where she's from, "because my school had a rowing team." When her family moved to Burleigh Manor before this school year, she "did some looking around and found the Baltimore Rowing Club." She knew no one there, but she knew the sport, and soon she fell right into the group.

Training, she said, "is really hard." For long practices, she and her partner will launch from the group's Waterview Avenue clubhouse, in south Baltimore, to Fort McHenry and back, a distance of about 5 kilometers (roughly 3.1 miles), or to the Inner Harbor, which Covino estimated at 7 kilometers (4.35 miles).

The 2,000-meter races, by contrast, are much faster, though both young women say they're no easier. And as athletes go, these are relatively petite folks to be propelling a 52-pound fiberglass boat: as members of a lightweight team, both must weigh in at less than 130 pounds.

"I try to eat healthy." Bogdan said.

Childhood on the water

Bogdan, who counts dance as her only athletically related childhood endeavor, grew up around the water, with her family enjoying a vacation home in Cape Cod.

"I've always liked being around the water," she noted, though being around the water for a competitive sport only started a year ago.

It's not easy work. One benefit of the rowing club's location on the Patapsco River, said Covino, "is that the rowers get used to the chop. Sometimes we race in choppy water, and teams that aren't used to it really struggle. We're used to it, and when we're on smooth water we can really fly."

For Bogdan, being able to fly took some doing, with the Ohio meet and her school final exams taking place at almost the same time. On Thursday, the day before the meet began, "I had English and Spanish final exams." After the exams she raced home, "packed and jumped in the car" to drive to Ohio. On Friday morning she was racing.

Bogdan, though, isn't complaining, because the day was even worse for her coaches. Covino said she left "at 4 a.m. with two boats on the roof," because the boats "turn an eight-hour drive into a 10-hour drive." With teams from all over the country arriving and competing, the Baltimore contingent "needs to get there in time to register and get set up."

When Bogdan and her teammate arrived their boat, Ariel was ready. They were racing before 9 a.m. Friday, posting a time of 9 minutes, 19.32 seconds in their first heat, which meant they wouldn't be competing in Sunday's finals. Saturday's racing, though, saw the team improve by almost 40 seconds, to a time of 8:41:84.

On Sunday morning, participating in a sort of consolation race called the petite final, the two posted an almost identical time of 08:42.78, good for a fourth-place finish. The duo's previous best times in competition "were around 8:46," recalled Bogdan, so even though they didn't win they posted their fastest race times ever.

Although the season is now over for Bogdan, she can race until age 18, as long as she's willing to commit to the grueling practice schedule of four practices of two hours each during the weeks when no races are in the near future, and six-day-a-week practices when a race is coming up.

Time, in fact, is the major commitment. Though Covino said the boats "can cost $12,000," the club keeps costs relatively modest for the participants, thanks to corporate sponsors. The group also brings in Baltimore City students, "who've never been near a boat like this," for a chance to see what competitive rowing is all about.

"Some of them are my students," said Covino, who is a music teacher for the city's public school system. "They've never experienced anything like this."

For Bogdan, whose McLean high school team went to the high school nationals last year, this wasn't her first appearance at a national competition. But for someone who's only been rowing for 2 1/2 years, the thrill of her second nationals was just as big as the thrill of her first.

Asked how she felt, the answer came in a burst faster than the sprint she and her teammate practice for the last 400 meters of a race: "Excited. Really excited. Really, really excited."

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