This article was written by Sarah Kalhorn
All middle school and high school kids, girls and boys, are invited to join the North Star Community Rowing team. No experience is necessary. Rowing provides a wide range of benefits physically, mentally and socially.
Unfortunately the sport of rowing is typically only available to a small percentage of youth. Many youth face significant barriers to participation, including expensive program fees, lack of transportation, and lack of comfort and familiarity with water sports.
North Star Community Rowing provides scholarships, swimming lessons, transportation, gear, healthy snacks, and academic support to ensure that our youth rowers have every resource they need to fully participate. Many of our youth rowers hadn’t been in a boat before they joined our program, and they can now row regardless of ability to pay. We accept new participants on a rolling basis. Our youth team currently operates out of a donated shipping crate/area at the Camden boat launch. Our summer practices are on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m.-noon. After Labor Day, our practices will be Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from 4:30-6:30 p.m. Anyone who is interested in more info can visit our website northstarcommunityrowing.org and fill out an interest form or contact our program director, Anna Greene at nscrprograms@gmail.com.
Rowing is not just for kids. We also offer an adaptive program for people of all ages with physical disabilities; however that program is at capacity until we can raise funds for more staff, boats and adaptive equipment.
Our community and veterans programs are also on pause due to COVID-19 but we hope to start back up in the next few months assuming it’s safe to do so, e.g. get indoors with people!
We currently meet at the Mississippi River at the Camden boat launch. In August we signed a lease for space in the Upper Harbor Terminal to build the first ADA-compliant Mississippi River access in the Twin Cities! So we will eventually, and assuming we hit our fundraising targets, have a permanent space in this neighborhood!