Conference-champion athlete. Double major in English lit and environmental studies with a minor in French. Successful dissertation on Chaucerian literature during a semester abroad at Cambridge. Member of the editorial board of the school newspaper. It’s safe to say there aren’t many Division I student-athletes who live in the center of that Venn diagram, but rising senior Juliette Gaggini of the Bucknell rowing team has accomplished all of that and more in her first three years as a Bison.
The Bucknell women’s rowing team is an annual Patriot League title contender, competing with the likes of Eastern powers Navy, Boston University, and Georgetown for supremacy at the top of a very good nine-team conference. Under head coach Stephen Kish ’92, the Bison won seven straight league titles from 2006-12, and they have never finished lower than fourth since the inception of the Patriot League Rowing Championship in 2005.
While top-caliber crews obviously need powerful rowers to blaze through the water, they also need a steady coxswain to lead the way. In the sport of rowing, the coxswain is the one member of the boat without an oar in her hands, but her role is every bit as critical. She is essentially a coach on the water. Stationed at the boat’s stern (in an eight-person crew) and facing her teammates, the coxswain is in charge of steering the boat, setting the team’s stroke rate, yelling encouragement, and making tactical adjustments throughout a standard 2,000-meter race. The role also has numerous dryland duties pre- and post-race, and excellent leadership skills are a must for the job.
The Bison have been fortunate to have a number of outstanding coxswains through the years, and Juliette Gaggini has already established herself as one of the best. She was already an experienced coxswain when she arrived at Bucknell, and she jumped right into the Varsity Eight as a first-year, earning Second Team All-Patriot League honors after guiding that crew to silver medals at the 2021 Patriot League Championships.
One year later, the 1V8+ topped that performance with a stunning runaway victory, beating runner-up Boston University by nearly seven seconds and six-time defending champion Navy by nine seconds. It was the largest victory margin in a 1V8+ final since 2008 and the third-largest in league history. This time Juliette was named First Team All-Patriot League and Academic All-Patriot League.
So how did Juliette discover the unique position of coxswain? A native of Washington, Connecticut, she followed in her older sister Margot’s footsteps as a rower at The Frederick Gunn School. Margot, who was three years older and would go on to row on the club team at Lafayette, was in the midst of a good experience on the team at Gunn, which inspired Juliette to join as well. The younger Gaggini was quickly told she was going to be a coxswain, which she didn’t know much about at the time, and furthermore, she was slotted in with the men’s team since they were short a few coxswains.
Juliette’s original plan was just to participate in the fall, since she typically played tennis in the spring, but she fell in love with the rowing team and made it a year-round endeavor.
“I had a really amazing high school coach, and he guided me through what it took to become a good coxswain,” Juliette recalls during a break from her summer job as a global risk analyst at Bank of America in Charlotte. “Going into my sophomore year we went to Scotland and did an exchange program with a school there. We competed in London and then we got to host them for the Head of the Charles in Boston the next fall. It was a really cool experience, and I was definitely hooked on rowing after that.”
Juliette was a team co-captain for her final two high school seasons and was twice named MVP of a strong men’s team, where she coxed the Varsity Four. She competed at the famed Head of the Charles three times, finishing as high as sixth in a field of more than 80 boats, and won gold at the Bill Braxton Memorial Regatta in 2017. Juliette also trained at two USRowing ODP summer camps, one with a men’s team and one with a women’s squad. That second summer convinced Juliette that she wanted to join a women’s team in college, which opened up a straight path to Bucknell.
Juliette came to Bucknell on a college visit and met former assistant coach Allison Carter, who filled her in on the program and showed her around the facility. Two weeks later, Juliette returned to campus for an official recruiting visit, and she was quickly sold.
“One thing I remember Coach Kish telling me in the recruiting process is that you have to like the school you go to. It can’t just be about one coach or one team, you need to like everything about whatever program you decide to go with. I definitely felt that way with Bucknell. I remember leaving my official and feeling so sad that I had to go. I was ready.”
Being a first-year coxswain can be intimidating. It is a high-level leadership role, and freshmen are not always comfortable leading juniors and seniors. But Juliette’s fears were allayed, recalling that the veterans on the team quickly accepted her and never questioned her direction.
That Fall 2020 semester was also heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. There were no fall competitions, and the team only trained in small boats that did not feature a coxswain. Juliette actually paired up with another coxswain and rowed in a double just to get out on the water, and it was not until the following February that the team got into fours and eights, which allowed for plenty of lead-up time for her to get acclimated to the squad.
“I had kind of an interesting first year in a lot of ways. At first it just felt weird talking to people who were older and much more experienced and telling them what to do. But the team is so great that I never felt like anyone didn’t respond to my direction. By the time we got to row again in the spring, I had a lot of time to meet everyone and had so many great friends on the team. So I didn’t feel as intimidated as I might have been if I had gotten in a boat in September.”
Now a rising senior and a mentor herself to numerous younger rowers, Juliette recalls several older teammates going out of their way to show faith in her as a first-year team member, and that confidence then permeated through the team.
“I would say Maddie Wickers, Casey Miller, and Natalie Kreusch were huge mentors, all in different ways. Erin Sullivan, too, but she was just everyone’s mentor, she’s the best. Maddie was a good friend of mine right from the first week of school. Casey was a senior in my freshman year, and she was kind of like my parent at school, always looking out for me. It was really nice. All four of them were in the boat, and they were some of my closest friends already and it was incredible to have their support. I felt like even the people I didn’t know as well on the team trusted me more just because those four trusted me.”
The proof of that trust came in the results. In the spring of 2021, the Bison Varsity Eight went undefeated in regular-season dual competitions against Colgate, Delaware, UConn, and Fordham, and they topped George Washington and George Mason to win the George Cup on the Occoquan River. In Juliette’s first Patriot League Championships, her 1V8+ pulled away from Boston University over the final 500 meters to lock up second place behind only Navy.
Fast-forward one year later, and Juliette’s crew turned in one of the most thrilling moments in the history of the Bucknell rowing program. The Bison 1V8+ finished fifth in its morning preliminary heat, good enough to make the Grand Final but in an outside lane. Amazingly, the crew chopped a whopping 28 seconds off its prelim time and stunned the field with a runaway victory.
Fans who have not seen the video (below) of the race with the overlay of Juliette’s voice are highly recommended to take a few minutes and check it out. Not only does it give great insight into what a coxswain says throughout a race, but it’s impossible not to get chills as the team crosses the finish line with tears flowing.
“My parents play that video at like every family event we’ve had since then. It was great; I mean, there are no words. I remember one thing very clearly was after we crossed the finish line and everyone was crying, we rowed over to shore to see Coach Kish. He told us to go do a lap and just take in the moment and really try to remember what we were feeling. I wasn’t even talking, we just did a lap and it felt like everything that we had worked for came together. Our seniors were leaving and there were so many emotions. I’ve never felt anything like that in my life. The long practice hours, the early mornings, it’s hard. Sometimes you can lose sight of the goal, but moments like that are why you do it.”
The Bison happily donned their gold medals (the Second Varsity Eight and Varsity Four both won bronze) and accepted the team runner-up trophy, but that would not be the last time the 1V8+ competed together. Later in the summer, the team traveled to England for the famed Henley Women’s Regatta, and then on to Switzerland. Juliette says that while the trip was spectacular, the 10 days of training leading up to it were just as fun.
“After the season ended, we all went home for about a week and then got to come back and be on campus together with no one else around. It was so much fun. We really got to take our time and work on things, unlike during the season when we have classes at 8 a.m. and need to rush through practice. And then going to Henley was incredible. It’s a very different course and a different racing style over there. It’s just two boats racing head-to-head, and you’re eliminated after you lose to one boat. It was definitely a bit of a mind game, and the course was particularly scary for me because instead of buoys to mark the course they have wooden beams. If you hit a buoy, it’s not great, but not the end of the world. If you hit a wooden beam you could break your oars. There was a pretty strong crosswind the day we were racing, and you’re right between another boat and the beam, so that was definitely stressful. We raced Cal Berkeley, which was a highly ranked team. It was an amazing experience.”
After the team parted ways for the summer, Juliette hopped right back on a plane and returned to England, where she was set for a study abroad semester at the University of Cambridge. The university is actually divided into 31 colleges, and Juliette studied English literature at Pembroke College, which was founded in 1347, a mere 499 years before Bucknell.
Each of the colleges has rowing teams that compete against the others within Cambridge, with more of a recreational feel. The overall university team is the one that rows against rival Oxford and at other major international regattas. During Juliette’s time there, the primary team featured one Olympian, and another had just graduated. NCAA rules did not permit Juliette to compete with them, but she felt honored to be around their practices.
“I just told them whatever they needed at practice I was willing to help. If they ever needed someone to step into a boat, I’m here. So I coxed for them probably five times. I would go to practice two days a week and sit on the launch, get to know the coaches, and hear their coaching styles, which were very different from ours. I also got to meet rowers from Harvard and Navy that we raced against the season before.”
Pembroke also provided a perfect outlet for Juliette to dive into another of her passions, English literature. While ultimately she is leaning toward a career in international or environmental law, Juliette took two rigorous English courses, which were set up very differently than a typical lecture-based American undergraduate class. At Pembroke, she would have a week to read a novel, write an essay on it, and discuss it one-on-one with the professor.
“I wrote more essays in my time there than I’d ever written, but I was also allowed to take the direction I wanted to take in my studies, which was really cool. One class was 1800 British Lit, which gave me a wide range of novels to choose from each week. The other class was Chaucer, which was a bit more structured because it was just one author. But even within that, we got to choose the direction of the essays I was writing. I was also able to choose the subject of my dissertation, and then my professor worked with me to find the right material.”
Juliette’s dissertation: a 35-page paper on the representation of women and gender in Chaucerian literature.
When she returns to campus in the fall, Juliette will embark on a senior honors thesis with English professor Ted Hamilton, which will actually serve to overlap her two majors. Professor Hamilton is an environmental lawyer in addition to teaching English, and the project will touch on the language and interpretation of written laws, and how they apply here locally on the Susquehanna River.
“One of the best things about environmental studies is the requirements for it. We take geology, biology, and other natural sciences, and I’ve gotten to work on the river in a number of different classes. I took an indigenous lit class with Professor Hamilton this past spring, which was also part of my thesis formulation. It’s a look at our area, our region, in three different lights, and I hope to tie them all together somehow.”
Juliette worked on her school newspaper in high school, so she found that joining The Bucknellian staff as a freshman was a great way to meet other people, particularly with group activities limited due to COVID. She started as a staff writer, and then served as a news editor as a sophomore before taking over the satire section last year. The satire role allowed her to show off her creative side, such as in a piece headlined “Statistics show positive correlation between economic stagnation and use of Wordle”, although now she admits that satire was not for her.
“The Bucknellian was a great way to get to know people and have another group to be part of outside of rowing. I did news for a year and then satire for a semester last spring, mostly because they didn’t have anyone and I thought sure, how hard could it be? It was actually hard and I did not enjoy it. This past spring I shifted to investigative news, which is a section that we are trying to enhance. I spent a lot of time editing and digging up stories for people to write about.”
In order to hone her leadership skills for her coxswain role, Juliette has worked extensively with the Bucknell Athletics Leadership Institute. She has attended the U.S. Naval Academy Leadership Conference and the Gettysburg Leadership Experience over the last two years, in addition to the Igniting Leaders and Leadership Roundtable programs at Bucknell.
“The experience at the Naval Academy really resonated, because we got to hear from so many leaders. I think about my high-stress situations and then I hear about the things that they went through, and I’m like, OK everything is fine. My group leader for those three days was on the Navy rowing team, so it was cool to get to know her a little bit and see her lead outside of rowing.”
Juliette still has a year to go, but it’s already fair to say she has made the most out of her time at Bucknell.
While earning another Patriot League medal is high on the list of goals for 2023-24, she says she is especially looking forward to the fall season, which is the time for team building and welcoming the newcomers, just as she was embraced in 2020. And that thinking is just what you would expect from a coxswain.
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