By MARK MOSCHETTI
Seattle Pacific Sports Information
 
SEATTLE – Her path to the water went through the dirt.
 
And through the snow.
 
But Kaitlin Dickinson found her way.
 
Found it to Seattle Pacific. To rowing. To the team's shellhouse on the shores of the Ship Canal.
 
 

From her first days on campus late in the summer of 2016 – long before she climbed into one of the school's eight-oared boats – Dickinson has been instrumental in helping the SPU program part the waves back toward a position of prominence, both along the West Coast and on the national scene.
 
"This team has been so much more than I ever could have hoped for," the 22-year-old said. "We started off with a stage of just having an environment where everyone was really happy to be part of a team. Then the word "NCAA" started buzzing around people's mind and we decided we wanted to be a competitive team.
 
 "(Then) last year, sitting in for the NCAA Selection Show, being able to watch the entire room erupt – I broke down in tears when we got announced to go to nationals."
 
Dickinson would have loved nothing more than to hear another such announcement this year.
 
Unfortunately, no announcement was coming, as all NCAA spring sports – along with athletic events everywhere, from Little League to the Olympics – were canceled because of the coronavirus.
 
So the pandemic swiped what was supposed to be Dickinson's senior season.
 
"My time of being a college athlete is over. But not my time of being part of the team," she said during an interview in early May.
 
As it turns out, however, Dickinson's not done yet.
 
A REPECHAGE, OF SORTS
Thanks to a decision by the NCAA in late March, all athletes who were participating in 2020 spring sports are able to retain this year of eligibility if they choose to do so.
 
Dickinson, who identifies so strongly with SPU's rowing program, was aware of that. Still, she was determined to move on and get her nursing career under way.
 
"My dream job was to start my residency at Children's (Hospital of Seattle) this year," she said. "I had a pediatric focus for my senior practicum, I had a fairly decent resume' – everything was shaping up, leading to the August start of the cohort.
 
"Then they sent out an e-mail saying it was canceled, and they weren't hiring any new grads."

As she moved toward her June graduation with her nursing degree, Dickinson started weighing all of her options. Among those was the opportunity to start grad school right away and begin preparing to take the exam that all nursing students must take to earn an RN license.
 
She saw the story about three SPU track and field seniors who are taking advantage of the opportunity to return. She heard about rowers from other schools who are doing the same. And, "I have four years to be a student-athlete and I'll be a nurse for 45 or 50 years.
 
"It was something I wanted, but it felt like so much of my career was that I needed to get into nursing right now," Dickinson added. "But I know it will be there waiting for me. I see it as seeing this whole process through where we started to put it together my freshman year and really hit it by my senior year. The right job will see that I cared so much."

 

FROM 'VROOM' TO 'STROKE'
In Dickinson's case, that identity as a Falcon rower was forged not just on various lakes, rivers, and canals in a seat of a gleaming white racing shell.
 
It also was forged on dirt trails aboard a motocross cycle and through winter wonderland backcountry on the seat of a snowmobile.
 
Before Kaitlin Dickinson ever put an oar into her hands, she strapped a helmet onto her head.

 

"When you hear those sports, you think all it involves is using a throttle," Dickinson said. "But racing motocross is one of the most physically demanding sports I've ever participated in. It's very much an endurance sport. And a snowmobile weighs about 450 pounds. So for eighth-grade me, not even 100 pounds, pulling it up on its side took a lot of patience and persistence."
 
In other words, it was perfect preparation for what eventually would become her next athletic pursuit.
 
"I love doing something I'm bad at because there is such a learning curve," Dickinson said of refining her motocross riding technique or figuring out how to yank up that snowmobile. "I can spend hours trying something over and over again – because I will get it.
 
"That has served me super-well for rowing."
 
BIG TRANSFORMATION
When Dickinson arrived from Monroe, about 30 miles northeast of Seattle Pacific, she was ready for more than just beginning her work as a nursing major.
 
"I knew SPU had a rowing team, and I wanted to try that," she said. "Rowing was on my radar. But I didn't hear that much about it."

  At that point in late summer 2016, a new head coach had not yet been selected. Then in the middle of October, Andrew Derrick was hired to take charge of the program after helping build Central Oklahoma into a national powerhouse.
 
"Our coach started, we went through the process, and I decided this was something I wanted to do," she said.
 
At 5-foot-5, Dickinson is smaller than most rowers. However, as Derrick got settled into his role, he saw that she brought so many other significant attributes.
 
"It took a little while for her to get comfortable. But she definitely started to stand out through her actions and performance," said Derick, who was at the helm until late last month when he was named the head coach at Gonzaga University in Spokane. "Even more valuable than her individual performance, the place where her skills have truly shown the brightest and helped her become an irreplaceable teammate was through her leadership and peer organization."
 
For Dickinson, that represented quite a personal transformation from how she saw herself.
 
"I came into college sincerely believing I was an introvert," she said. "But it was more just realizing that I was never super-confident in high school.
 
"Now, I'm the most extroverted person I know," she said with a laugh.
 
She started inviting teammates to coffee. She organized team dinners and board-game nights. In so doing, Dickinson was effectively selling everyone on the kind of culture Derrick wanted to build.
 
"The honest effort she puts in on a day-to-day basis that people don't see is incredible," said senior Gillian Edgar, a two-time All-American. "The activities she creates help us to get to know our teammates on a way deeper level. You pull up on the line, and you know the person in front of you a little bit better.".
 
Added Derrick, "Even if she had never been able to take a stoke for us in the last couple years, her leadership has made the team faster by helping others reach their potential."
 
"TAKE US SERIOUSLY NOW"
During those dinners or trivia games, when the conversation should have been about anything except rowing, it inevitably shifted toward rowing.
 
"Everyone is so excited when it comes back to that," Dickinson said.
 
Hey … why shouldn't it be exciting?
 
Beginning with the 2017 season, the Falcons have steadily stepped up. One weekend, it might be finishing in front of a head-to-head match-up against a nearby school. On another, it might be going bow-to-bow against regional or national powers – and finishing ahead in some of those, too.
 
"It felt like so much of it in my first two years as having to prove to other teams that we were worth racing – and simply surprising other teams," Dickinson said. "No matter how well we did, it was a shock to other teams when we beat them.
 
"People are going to take us seriously now."
 
In 2018 at the 80th Dad Vail Regatta in Philadelphia, Seattle Pacific made the grand final and finished fourth – a noteworthy accomplishment. But ultimately, it wasn't quite enough to earn a bid to the NCAAs.
 
"That race was going so well," Dickinson said, "and we were in position to make it happen. It was probably 400 meters to go, and the boat we needed to stay in front of (Barry University of Florida) passed us, and they beat us by two seconds.
 
"It was that feeling of heartbreak," she added. "We all got out of the water and were standing in a circle, and the girls kept their sunglasses on so you couldn't see them crying, knowing we had put everything out there."
 
OK, LET'S JUST TRY AGAIN
They kept putting everything out there in 2019 – and kept getting results.

 

 With Dickinson now seated in the bow (she had been in other seats as a freshman and sophomore), SPU was fifth at the San Diego Crew Classic, fifth at the Western Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships, and third in the prestigious Windermere Cup on the Montlake Cut.
 
Finally, at a tri-meet with Central Oklahoma and Barry in Oklahoma City, the Falcons were just two seconds behind the host Bronchos, but a whopping 10½ seconds ahead of Barry – the same school that had popped their NCAA bubble one year earlier in Philly.
 
"I certainly wasn't going to say it when they were standing on the shore in Philadelphia, but I knew we were set for the next year," Derrick said. "People like Kaitlin were going to be determined and they were going to use that two-second loss to fuel their work over the next summer and the next year. It was important that we go and try to flip that the next year, and we did, in large part due to Kaitlin."
 
Just three days after the race in Oklahoma, the Falcons gathered in the Hendricks Lounge on the top floor of Brougham Pavilion for the NCAA announcement.
 
In an unusual twist, the rest of the country knew that SPU was in even before the Falcons themselves knew it. The Selection Show began at 2:00 p.m. Pacific time, when several of the rowers were still in class.
 
So they collectively agreed not to check their phones or social media for any information. Instead, they would meet in the lounge at 3:00, watch a replay of the show, and find out together.
 
"Everyone had been working so hard. It was a real sense of satisfaction that we had been working toward a goal, and it paid off," said Dickinson, still getting just a bit emotional in recollecting that moment.
 
FROM 2000 METERS TO 26 MILES
Dickinson and her teammates made the most of it, coming home from Indianapolis with a fourth-place finish among the six qualifying schools.
 
They were primed for even more in 2020.

 

But the coronavirus changed all that. In mid-March, all subsequent races and practices were canceled for the rest of the year.
 
"I remember just getting that e-mail, and I was in disbelief," Dickinson said. "For a while, there was still hope that maybe we would still get to practice or maybe have three races. But it was just this progressive thing of you keep hoping, and then having it shot down."
 
Did she dwell on it or brood about it? Nope – not Dickinson. She and two of her teammates who decided to stay in Seattle transformed their dining room into a gym, complete with rowing machines. Fellow rower Roxy Ruther was training for a marathon, which she was planning to run with her father in San Francisco. Dickinson decided to join her for some training runs.
 
"I've never been much of a runner, but I jumped into that and just following her training plan with her," Dickinson said. "I never thought I would enjoy running. Now, it's something I look forward to every day."
 
When the race was postponed until fall, a new plan hatched. Ruther, her father, Dickinson, and rowing teammate Gillian Edgar, are planning to run their own marathon – 26.2 miles – on the Burke Gilman Trail later this year.
 
"Roxy was training, and we were looking for something to do other than erg in our kitchen every day," said Edgar, who as a freshman ran the 800 meters for the SPU track team before eventually making the switch to rowing. "(A marathon) has always been on my bucket list."
 
It hadn't been on Dickinson's list, however.
 
"At the beginning of the year, if someone had told me my senior season would be canceled due to a global pandemic, I would have laughed," Dickinson said. "If someone had told me I would be training for a marathon, I would have laughed even harder."
 
NURSING, ROWING … IT ALL FITS
Dickinson is just as devoted to her nursing studies as she is to rowing. A good chunk of her focus this year was on her clinicals. But like academic pursuits everywhere, those clinicals shifted online. Dickinson, who wants to go into pediatrics, dressed up in her scrubs for 10 hours a week of case studies focused on pediatric patients.

 

"We have virtual patients that we run through," she said. "It's not necessarily hands-on, but it still requires critical thinking."

In Dickinson's case, nursing and rowing fit very well together.
 
"I don't think I would have been able to do nursing without rowing," Dickinson said. "For rowing, it requires teamwork, time management, leadership, goal setting, and communication. Those are all so important with nursing.

"Even the ability to adapt to a challenge and jumping in as a new grad nurse without the opportunity to have a senior practicum in a hospital – rowing is really going to give me that opportunity to make myself comfortable wherever I am and just work through that."
 
While she now has the 2021 season to anticipate, Dickinson sees herself someday sitting in a shell again even after she eventually pulls her final stroke for Seattle Pacific.
 
"I'm going to miss that competitive environment so much, and I'm so appreciative of what my teammates and I share," she said. "It's something that won't ever be the same.

 
"But I can see myself getting a single and going out there and rowing on my own. It's an extremely beautiful sport."
 
Of course, she might say the same about bumping along dirt or gliding through snow.
 
But clearly …
 
… Kaitlin Dickinson has found her way to the water.