
No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Clearly, Mr. Emerson did not row, but he does highlight the similarity between a rowing team and a professional maid service company.
Emerson would have been teaching at Harvard when they built their boat club in 1840. Not to be outdone, Yale did likewise the following year. Neither school got around to racing each other for 12 years. On August 3, 1852 Harvard accepted Yale’s challenge to “test the superiority of the oarsmen of the two colleges.” This was the genesis of intercollegiate athletics. This is the exact point where the NCAA crawled out of a primordial swamp (pronounced Charles River), in search of the basketball & football.







