ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
D AV I D R E E D E R (‘ 8 8 )
DAVID REEDER EDITOR’S NOTE While I was doing program research, I stumbled across David quite by accident. I immediately noticed his success with the strong lightweight crews of the mid 1980’s and that he has a long track record as both a coach and an educator. Since 1999 David has been teaching and coaching at Northfield Mount Hermon, a boarding school in central Massachusetts close to the Vermont and New Hampshire borders. These combined elements compelled me to reach out and get to know him more. I hope you enjoy getting to know him as much as I did. David Herrick ‘14
David Herrick: When did you row for WSU? David Reeder: I started fall of ’84 my sophomore year and finished in 1988, so I took the five-year track. DH: What got you into rowing? DR: A group of guys in my dorm were on the team and they sounded like they were having fun. I was in the marching band and had never been an athlete. I was convinced to try it out.
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THE PULL HARD
SPRING 2021
It was great learning something new, being on the river, and gradually learning what it meant to be an athlete. My first race was against Gonzaga in the fall, we raced below the dam. There was a competitive switch that turned on for me and from that point I was hooked. I can thank my teammates and Coach Struckmeyer for that. DH: Any particularly strong memories of your time at WSU? DR: That first year we had some veteran guys, very committed athletes and smart too, engineering and math types. They were pretty excited about the team; they had been working hard building it. We won PAC-10’s that May for the first time. We loved beating the Huskies. Then we did it again next year. My wife, Mary Farrell (an alum of the women’s team), reminded me we used to skip rocks before practice, trying to hit the pylons. DH: You have two PAC-10 titles to your name as a lightweight, who were your biggest competitors during those seasons? DR: UW of course, they had lightweights then, so did Oregon State. The southern California schools were particularly fast, Cal, and San Diego State. We usually had them in mind. We went to the Crew Classic and suddenly were racing Yale and Penn and realized we could compete with them; I think we took 3rd. We loved racing them when we got the chance, I don’t think they paid us much attention though.
