Feature Story: Captains Garrett, Thiele Near The Finish Line
June 01, 2024 | Women's Rowing - Open
BETHEL, OHIO — Catherine Garrett’s legs are bright red. She has just gotten out of a makeshift ice bath, and the color of her legs certainly confirms that.
She is sitting on a training table just outside of the Princeton open rowing tent on the shore of Harsha Lake, in Southern Ohio not far from the borders of Indiana and Kentucky, where the NCAA championships are being contested this weekend.
She is a Princeton co-captain, a leader of the largest roster in program history, a roster that runs 56 deep. If anyone can speak to the toll that a rowing season can take, it's Garrett, though she doesn't have to actually speak to it. Her red legs are doing that for her.
“The ice bath?” she says. “Yeah, that’s cold. Very cold. Numbingly cold. But you know what?”
What?
“I actually like it.”
Of course she does. It’s part of the nature of the sport. It’s punishing, on the mind and the body, no more so than during these championships. It’s a grueling gauntlet of three 2,000-meter races in three days, with the challenge of finishing in the top half of your six-boat heats the first two days to advance to where you really want to be, and where Princeton now is, which is to be racing Sunday in the Grand Finals.
Princeton advanced all three of its boats — the First Varsity 8, Second Varsity 8 and Varsity 4 — into the championship round. The Tigers are the only Ivy League team to be represented in all three of the A finals, though four other schools have also done so: Texas, Stanford, Tennessee and Washington.
Garrett is a member of the 2V. So is Princeton’s other captain, Klara Thiele. A year ago, Thiele won bronze with the 1V. Two years ago, Garrett was part of the Tigers NCAA champion V4 gold medal-winning boat, the fourth Princeton boat ever to win an NCAA title.
The 1V started Saturday’s semifinals with a second-place finish in its heat. The V4 ended the morning with a second-place of its own. In between, the 2V spent most of its race in fourth, which would have meant racing in the B Final Sunday, only to power back with a strong finish in third to advance.
“The A Final is definitely what we wanted,” Thiele says. “We stayed super calm in our semifinal. This is the national championship. It’s close racing. It’s how it’s supposed to be. When we got out of the boat, [coxswain] Hailey Sulzbach said “that was so much fun” and she was right. It was fun.”
The Princeton 1V is made up of seven juniors and two freshmen, something that has left the two senior captains in the 2V boat. If they’re upset about that at all, you could never tell from how they speak and act. In fact, they seem to relish their role as leaders and contributors.
“My goal is always to make the team as fast as possible,” Garrett says. “Whatever my role ended up being, that was fine. It’s not what boat you’re in. It’s how you inspire your teammates to be their best selves.”
“I’m happy where I am,” Thiele says. “I’m happy where I am. It’s never about being in the first boat. It’s about what makes the team faster. I’m where I belong.”
Thiele is a European who will be staying in New Jersey to start her post-Princeton career. Garrett is from Connecticut, but she’ll be heading to Europe now that she has graduated.
Thiele grew up in Mülheim an der Ruhr, in the western part of Germany. She was a team handball player before she found rowing when she was 14, and she took to it quickly.
“I did both for a little while, but then it was just rowing,” she says. “Once you start rowing, you can’t stop.”
Her path to Princeton was hardly direct. She graduated from high school in 2018 and then took a year off to travel, making stops in New Zealand and Australia and even learning to scuba dive in Thailand. She then began “University” in Germany until she began to reconsider her choice not to go to college in the United States.
She first came onto the radar of Princeton head coach Lori Dauphiny through her successful international career, including at the Junior World Championships.
“I was always ‘No. No. I don’t want to go to America. No.,’” Thiele says. “Then I went to an official visit at Princeton and I just loved it. I wanted to be there. It was a great. It was such a great community, and I wanted to be a part of that.”
Garrett grew up in Darien, Conn., where she was a youth soccer player. One of her good friends in eighth grade had a family friend who was a rower, and when her friend didn’t want to try it by herself, Garrett offered to go. As was the case with Thiele, Garrett’s other sport career ended quickly.
Her path to Princeton was a bit more traditional. Dauphiny recruited her, and she jumped at the chance.
“I had an opportunity for an official visit, and I loved it,” Garrett says. “I was lucky enough that Lori wanted me. It was a great fit. Princeton is an awesome school. I love that you can be a student and an athlete equally.”
With the way the schedule worked out, they were able to attend graduation Tuesday before the team flew out to Cincinnati Wednesday. The team hotel is actually across the border in Kentucky, about 40 minutes away from the lake in East Fork State Park.
“My parents came for graduation,” Thiele says. “In Germany, I’d never had the hat and the gown. We don’t do that in Germany. It was a very exciting for me to go through it at Princeton. My parents never finished high school, so it was very big for them as well.”
Day 1 of the NCAA racing was Friday, when the first varsity and varsity four both won their heats and the second varsity finished in second. To reach the championship finals for Sunday, the three Princeton boats had to finish in the top three in Saturday’s semifinals, and all three did.
The first Princeton boat on the water Sunday morning will be the 4V at 9:36, followed by the 2V at 10 and the 1V at 10:24. The races go off like clockwork.
And after that, it’ll be over for the seniors, including the two captains. Thiele, whose degree is in chemical and biological engineering, will be staying in New Jersey to work for a pharmaceutical company. Garrett, who majored in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, is headed to the graduate program in bio science enterprise at the University of Cambridge, with a goal of starting her own company in the field of women’s health.
“It seems like an exciting next step for me,” she says. “I was lucky enough to get in. Graduation was overwhelming. I don’t think it’s really hit us yet. And finishing out the college experience with rowing? This is the best way to go out.”
“The teammates I made here, that’s why I want to stay in America for now,” Thiele says. “Getting all our boats into the A finals is great. The moments you remember the most are the ones like being in the ice baths with your friends. Seeing each other every day. Being so close together. You see them at their worst, right? That’s very bonding.”
— by Jerry Price
