Sparks Consulting : Catch onto college. Spark your potential.

Coxswain Coaching and College Counseling

We see coxing as an integral discipline in our sport. Beyond our rowing camps and coxswains only camp, we've uniquely designed the only mentoring program in the world for coxing that integrates coxswain coaching and college counseling.

A good coxswain can make the difference between the three feet it may take to win a race and the thirty feet the boat may lose with a poor skill set. Thus, given a lack of objective standards the recruiting process for coxswains is different as well and requires a higher and earlier level of skill and tenacity than the rowing athlete's.

The Process of Coxswain Coaching

Work is conducted on an individual basis via video conference during the rowing season. We originally developed a sixty four point evaluation system broken into an eight point score card. From there, we broke things into four key areas: awareness, steering, organization, and direction.

We thus mentor clients via a process of identifying goals in these areas, allowing them to goto practice or competition and execute, then meeting again to analyze and continue. We also use these opportunities to introduce specific situational ideas, enabling them to utilize particular technical situations to their advantage, and increasing their peripheral understanding of the sport. We'd invite you to check out our coxswain specific references.

Coxswain Mentoring by Top Coxswains

Olympic bronze medalist Marcus McElhenney and National Team coxswain Steven Young designed our coxswain program with a single goal: to give coxswains the tools to pursue the discipline they love effectively - and thus improve on their own. Meanwhile, they also blend our highly successful approach to college counseling into the program uniquely for each student based on their year, place in the sport, character, and goal set.

As should be obvious by now, this means a lot more than tape review! We want coxswains to be able to pursue the sport such that their tapes will take care of themselves long after we're gone and they're competing for collegiate first varsity 8+s and beyond.

Getting Started

We love working with folks who are passionate about the sport, and we recognize that no two people connect with rowing in the same way. We interview folks before they become clients with our firm - as our coxswain program integrates with our college counseling program, we plan a timeline as to how to structure coxswain coaching, goal sets, and the recruiting process. We generally like to start with sophomores or juniors, though we have provided coxswain coaching only to seniors.

Teaching coxswains to teach themselves ultimately betters their program - and we're proud to be able to give back to every piece of the rowing community this way.