There is a large variety of sports teams for both men and women at Ohio State whether they are varsity level or intramural. If an OSU student wants to compete in a sport it’s available. The interesting thing though is the varsity level rowing team. After speaking with students around campus, most of them naturally assumed that the rowing team at Ohio State was a men’s rowing team. They were wrong. Ohio State does not have a varsity level men’s rowing team. There is only a women’s varsity level rowing team. After explaining this to students their views on the rowing team changed drastically.

If you know anything about rowing, you know that it is a very difficult and challenging sport both in the way it is performed and on an athlete. It is not easy to push your way through water using your arms and rows, thus participants in rowing must have extremely good upper body strength. In this day and age though, rowing is generally categorized as more of man’s sport because men seem to generally speaking have more upper body strength. This is what makes it so impressive that Ohio State’s varsity level rowing team is a women’s team and not a men’s team. The women on this team are showing that the stereotype of men having better upper body strength than women isn’t always true. These women are proving that they can do just as well as men can in a sport that is just as challenging on a man as it is a woman.

The male student’s that I spoke with scoffed a little when they found out that there was no men’s rowing team. One student even commented, “There just isn’t a lot of interest from the guys at this school then. If more guys were interested in being on the rowing team they would be much better than the girls rowing team.” The female’s response to this comment and the new knowledge that there is only a women’s varsity rowing team was quite different.

All of the female students that I spoke with were impressed that there was no men’s team and they just wrote off the comment from the male student about the men potentially having a better team. The female students said that it’s empowering to see female’s having a sport that male’s don’t when female sports are generally the minority at major universities. The rowing team kicks it into gear in late March against Notre Dame in Columbus. Now that students know about the rowing team only being a women’s varsity team, there just might be a higher following of students this season cheering on the Buckeye’s Women’s Rowing Team.