PROFILE

Amanda Kraus speaks to Row360 at the end of her first month as CEO of USRowing

Words: Benedict Tufnell

You’re one month into the job, how has it been?

It’s been busy. They call it drinking from the proverbial fire hose. There’s a really nice community of national governing body CEOs who are in touch with one another and a lot of them reached out and said “welcome” and “I’m here to help”. All sorts of sports; squash, synchronised swimming etc. It’s been fun hearing from them all. They all said, “I am sure you are drinking from the fire hose” and it’s really the best way to describe it. Just taking in all of this information, while at the same time there is an organisation to run. You don’t have the luxury of saying “Ok I’m just going to take this all in”. So busy, but fun and super interesting.

Is it what you expected? 

I think it is what I expected. I knew there would be an enormous amount of work to do. I expected it to be a lot of learning and a lot of peeling away at the layers. I was talking to someone here after my first week, which was definitely harder than it is now – I am up to my fourth week now – and I said “it’s been hard,” he said “well, it’s self-inflicted”. So yes, I think it’s what I expected.

You have had to do much of the job remotely so far?

Ninety nine percent of it has been done remotely. I had one chance to go out on the water with Tom Terhaar and the women’s team in Princeton. It was amazing to spend the morning with them.

‘There are opportunities for us to be better communicators, to celebrate the sport, to celebrate the diversity of the sport, to engage people more, to listen more. And I think we have the challenge of building trust again too.’

I think there is mostly cons to being remote, as everyone knows. Especially when you are new and the staff are new to you, and there is only so much you can do on Zoom. Yesterday we had a 4-hour finance meeting on Zoom, and it makes it that bit more gruelling. I am sure there are psychologists having a field day about why this is so hard for us humans, and I have read about it a little bit, about why these screens are exhausting for us, but it definitely adds an element of making it more difficult. The silver lining is that you can close the screen and turn it off for a couple hours and just do the work and no one can interrupt you. It saves on commute time too. So, it’s been all the same pros and cons that most people have experienced in the times of Covid, but mostly cons. Especially when everyone is new. You don’t have relationships that then went virtual; you are starting all your relationships with your staff virtually.

So where are you based?

I’m in Brooklyn in New York. USRowing’s offices are in Princeton but we are closing those. Mostly because the lease is ending, and we haven’t used them since March. We are going to take some time to stay remote and then re-assess where everybody is.

You previously founded and ran for 18 years the non-profit organisation Row New York. How did you come to do that?

I started Row New York after graduate school because I felt like rowing was very limited to mostly people coming from backgrounds of privilege in the United States – very white and affluent. I had worked for a program in Boston called Girls Row Boston out of Community Rowing and I just thought “this is incredible”. I had first-hand experience of recruiting girls and coaching them on the Charles River, seeing what rowing did for them and how much it changed their lives. I thought “this is the best thing I have ever seen happen,” and, to cut a very long story short, I decided to recreate that in New York City. It was definitely easier said than done because we didn’t have any infrastructure; Columbia rows here but they didn’t have the resources to support a youth program just launching. I had just finished graduate school and was very young at the time. It’s amazing looking back how much education you can have and still not know how to do much. But I figured it out as I went along. I learned how to build a board, fundraise, run a program, fix a skeg, coach, do the accounting for a non-profit; all of those things at once. I don’t think I did all of those things well, but I knew enough about all of them to do some of them well and for the others I got good at finding other people who can do them well. And so, it grew from there. It was definitely a good experience to have gone through now that I am going through this experience. My husband, who was with me through the whole period of founding Row New York, said to me recently that it really feels like I’m back 20 years ago, which is interesting because I am not founding USRowing, but it has a similar feel.