Talk to anyone who has been coached or coxed by Amanda Harvey Cashman, one of Marin's sculling coaches, and they will tell you how powerful her influence has been. They might tell you about their kid with no motivation who was sparked to become a passionate rower, or the time they had a sculling lesson with her and immediately started to win races. Or maybe you will hear, from the rowing-obsessed father who asked Amanda to help him convince his 11 year old daughter that rowing was as much fun as horses, how Amanda told her, "Don't listen to your dad. I want you to forget rowing forever unless it calls to you in a very loud voice. And I mean loud."

Amanda has a way with kids, showing them how the sport fits into their world. "She makes it fun" says one of Amanda's youngest scullers. She uses examples from your other hobbies and relates them to rowing and you go, 'OK, I get it now' ". "Mostly I like teaching freshmen and kids," says Amanda. "There is something about showing people how to row that I just love". "You have to be very resilient to row," and, she adds with a smile, "It also helps if you are a raging egomaniac." Steve Johnson, member of Marin's mens' masters program and former stroke of the famous 1964 Cal varsity eight has 2 boys, Zack and Jake who have both been coached by Amanda. "She is very insightful," he says, "and, she is possessed of a great personality. She is truly a great motivator." Matthew LeMerle, another master mens' member, who has several children learning to scull with Amanda agrees, "She really has a knack of motivating kids" he says. "She makes it enjoyable for them from the first time they sit in a boat".

Amanda and her son, Jed.

Amanda feels strongly that kids need to nurture their bodies if they are to avoid injury and become true athletes later in life. "Do as many different sports as you can while you are still growing", she says. "The more you do different sports, the better equipped your body is to handle the type of abuse that rowing inflicts on it."

As a 13 year old girl, Amanda learned very early on how hard sports can be on your body. At Phillips Academy in Andover, she blew out her knee playing field hockey and lacrosse. Her injury was a good thing for rowing, because it caused her to take up coxing. She had a crush on the captain of the boys' rowing team, and would stand in a prominent position as the crew bus drove by. She was also impressed by the older girls in the dorm who rowed. She soon found her way into the coxswain's seat of a boat with the sister and the cousin of the boy's captain, "which", she says, "was the closest I was going to get to him."

For someone as shy as Amanda was back then coxing might seem to have been a counter-phobic occupation. Amanda explains it this way: "I did well in school, but I was painfully shy. Lots of people I admired and respected rowed, so when I started coxing I finally felt like I belonged. It gave me a lot of confidence to feel like I was in charge, with a big responsibility. Also, it was a rush to feel trusted by adults- a great feeling that forced me to get out of myself."

When Amanda talks about coxing, she really becomes animated, as though tapping into a half forgotten reservoir of passion. "I think I was good at it because I was aggressive and great at steering. Coxing is very hard because steering straight is pretty much impossible. People thought I knew what I was doing because being shy I learned to fake things to cover up. Pretty soon I did not have to fake any more - I really did know what I was doing. Some of the things a good cox knows come almost through ESP, like the fact that the 4 seat is driving with only the inside leg. What helped me the most though apart from ESP was my excellent eyesight and ability to focus intensely. I could take in a lot of information in an instant - what the wind is doing...the current...where the other boat is... their momentum (dying or surging) ... the stroke rate ...information about individual rowers... how much time is left..." Amanda pauses briefly and pushes on, "The most important thing of all in a race for a cox is to focus on how much time is left in the race and how much is left to do."

"Coxing is also about inspiring crews - how to get them to give more. If you are confident that they will win, you radiate that belief and the crew reflects it right back at you. I was hopefully able to radiate that belief. I have always felt that my main task as a cox was to make myself irrelevant. The crew does the work for you, if you steer them straight". Amanda won her first race ever as cox - an intramural race on the Merrimack River. At the end of season each crew was apparently required to dress up in costume. Amanda's boat dressed up as an ice cream sundae, with Amanda as the cherry on the top (the photo went "missing" before this article was written).

Since Philips Academy, Amanda's accomplishments as cox include six victories at the Head of the Charles, in championship eights, championship fours, lightweight fours and lightweight eights (three times). She is also a veteran of many National team camps, having won numerous USRowing Championship medals as a member of the Boston Rowing Center. As coach she has put in coaching stints as freshman coach at Dartmouth, Princeton and Radcliffe and as varsity coach at Deerfield Academy and coach on the US national team and assistant coach to the Hong Kong Olympic team. Amanda of course takes coaching as seriously as she did coxing, and recalls one piece of coaching advice from an early mentor. "He said to me, 'as a coach, Amanda, your crews will pay for every mistake you make'."

Amanda joined the Junior US national team as cox in 1986 and was cox for the US national lightweight team in 1987 and 1988. In 1989 she went into the Olympic Development Team, catching the attention of the US women's team's new German coach, Hartmut Bushbacker, who was famous for his short fuse; Amanda thinks he admired her in part because she refused to be intimidated by him. She was involved in head to head tryouts against the legendary Yasmin Farooq, who was the US National team cox for many years before she became an Olympic broadcast personality. Betsy McCagg is a friend and former crewmate of Amanda's. She is also a three times Olympian, five time world medalist, eleven time national champion and sister of Olympian Mary McCagg. "Amanda could fluster Yasmine", says McCagg, "and Yasmin is not easily flustered. But the coach liked dealing with just one person." As often happens with coxswains, Yasmin was there first and was just too hard to unseat, so Amanda had to settle for the substitute role. Two time world lightweight pairs champion Ellen Minzner says, "you have to respect Amanda for putting up with Hartmut. Her approach is, if you didn't laugh you would cry. She really has a great sense of humor which balances her intensity." As Amanda says, "not getting Yasmin's seat opened up a whole different life that I would otherwise not have known."

Amanda (far right), and her Radcliffe crew after defeating Princeton and winning the Eastern Sprints in 1997.

"What makes Amanda so good," says McCagg, "is not only her amazing technical knowledge but also her passion for her athletes, whether coaching or coxing. She puts all of her heart and soul into a race and ends it as tired as any rower at the end of the race. She demands a lot of the team, and you believe her because of her intensity and respond by wanting to give the intensity back to her." McCagg recalls Amanda's most memorable race as being one where Amanda was not even in the boat. She was coaching the freshman crew at Radcliffe. "They had a habit of being down, often almost terminally down, and launching ridiculous comebacks. They usually won, but it was just horrifying to watch." Amanda and Betsy have slightly different accounts of one of Amanda's races as coach of the Radcliffe crew, but it went something like this: In the final of the Eastern Sprints. Radcliffe was almost a boat length behind, with 400 meters to go. Amanda's stroke looked across at the Princeton boat, like Seabiscuit eyeing War Admiral and that, Amanda says, was when she knew they would win. "We ploughed through Princeton and won by almost a length."

Turning again to coaching, this time for the national team, in 1994 Amanda was assistant coach of the US lightweight four that won the world championships. In 1995 and 1996 she coached the US lightweight pair of Ellen Minzner and Christine Smith to gold in the world championships "We were world champions already", says Ellen, "so we knew we were fast, but Amanda helped us get faster. As lightweights where power is pretty equal between the crews, technique is everything. When Amanda started coaching us, it was the best thing that could have happened for Christine and me, because she was relentless about technique. We were peers, and it is always hard to coach your peers, but Amanda just went right ahead. In a straight pair", (which is already the most technically challenging boat to master), "she had us rowing feet out with squared blades, and she would not let up until we had it down. Her intense focus on our technique gave us the confidence that we could do anything." After Minzner and Smith's second gold in 1996, Amanda coached the heavyweight US womens' pair to 5th place in the world in 1997.

What strikes you about Amanda is that, with all the accomplishments and the praise heaped on her by world class rowers, she seems almost reluctant to acknowledge that she has done anything special. Minzner explains it this way: "The National Team is a great leveler. There is so much talent on the Team, yet Amanda has a lot of humility because she was always able to recognize that there are a few fortunate people who win big, but a lot who are just as strong and are part of the same struggle but who do not have the same fortune."

Amanda met her husband, Joe Harvey, also a storied oarsman, at Deerfield Academy where he was teaching and she was trying to recruit a Deerfield girl for Harvard crew. Joe had been captain of the 1989 Harvard national champion eight that has just been inducted into the Harvard Hall of Fame. Amanda left Harvard in 1998, and after stops in Deerfield and Texas, the couple finally made the move to Marin in 2001. It was a logical move, as Ellen Minzner was coaching at Cal and Amanda knew Sandy Armstrong. Amanda initially coached sculling at Marin and then put in a year coaching for Sandy Armstrong before returning as sculling coach after the birth of her son, Jed.

Joe is now Athletic Director at Marin Academy where he also teaches and Jed, now three, is in preschool and is already being offered coxing assignments by the master men. "That's fine" Amanda says, "but Jed was the largest baby ever born at Marin General, at 24 inches and 11 pounds 3 ounces. I think he will be a heavyweight rower." Excellent point.

And how does Amanda like coaching at Marin?

"I feel so fortunate," she sighs. "I am lucky beyond belief."