Dawn on the Raritan. Normally, there would be a mist rising off the murky river as the sun warmed the cool water, but on this day, the air was still cold.

The young men and women of the Rutgers crew team were dressed for it, in an un-uniform array of sweatshirts and hats. They did their stretching while it was still mostly dark, then shouldered their racing shells and oars, and carried them out of the boathouse and down to the dock. They settled in, to row.

Around them, New Brunswick was waking up. Lights in the high-rises and office towers were flicking on, traffic was picking on the Albany Street Bridge, commuter trains were crossing the river along the Northeast Corridor.

As the boats silently cut through water, this thought came to mind: Rutgers crew on the Raritan predates everything around them except the river itself — cars and paved roads, trains and tracks, the bridges that carry them, every building in sight, from the New Brunswick skyline to the houses across the river on a bluff in Highland Park.

Rutgers crew, born in 1864, celebrates its 150th anniversary with a gala on Saturday that will bring in a couple hundred alumni from across the country. It is the oldest sport on campus, trumping the historic first college football game between Rutgers and Princeton by five years.

And it remains the most pure. The men’s team, reduced to club status a few years back as Rutgers went all in for the so-called revenue sports, offers no scholarships. Both men and women lug their own equipment. They tie down the boats for road trips and dismantle the riggers and oar locks. The boathouse has a tool kit and boxes of screws, nuts and bolts, and everyone knows how to use them. After each practice, the teams wash down the shells, sending whatever the Raritan tries to stick down the drain.

And it’s been this way since the Civil War.

But age alone didn’t make it legendary. The people on the oars did that.

A pair of kids, Chuck Logg and Tom Price, who was only a freshman, won the gold medal at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics in a two-man shell called "Cinderella."

They are at the top of a long list of Rutgers medal winners on the world stage. The names read like an American rowing hall of fame. Fred Borchelt, three-time Olympian, silver medalist in Los Angeles. Jim Neil, 15-time national team member, two-time Olympian, world champ. Jennifer Dore-Terhaar, 10-time national team member, two-time Olympian, world champ. Bob Kaehler, four-time world champ, 10-time national team member, three-time Olympian. Kaehler, Sean Hall and Jeff Klepacki made three Rutgers rowers in an eight-man shell when the U.S. won a world championship in 1994.

This is a very abridged list, but point made.

"When you look at the quality of rower we’ve produced, it’s a very proud tradition," said Klepacki, himself a three-time Olympian. "When you look at the quality of the person, it’s even better, because the rigors of crew set you up for success. It develops a person who knows how to work in unity with others for the same goal."

One current team captain, Brendan Striano, is completing his fourth year at Rutgers simultaneously with his first year of medical school. He understands academic success starts with getting up in the morning, something college students sometime find hard to do.

"The rigorous practice schedule sets you up to learn good time management," he said.

It also sets you up to be part of a family, stretching back generations.

"Everywhere you go in the rowing community, everyone knows somebody who rowed at Rutgers," Striano said. "It’s one degree of separation."

Striano learned this at Nutley High, where his coach, Kevin Smyth, rowed at Rutgers for current coach Steve Wagner.

"I’d say we have maybe 50, 60 guys either coaching in college or high school, or the national teams," said Wagner, who rowed at Rutgers and is in his 37th year as a coach, 25th as head coach. Almost all of those guys rowed for Wagner.

One of those guys, Tom Terhaar, coached the U.S. women’s eight to Olympic gold medals in 2008 and 2012. Will Porter is the head women’s coach at Yale. Charlie Butt coaches Harvard’s men’s lightweights. Rob Friedrich is head coach at the U.S. Naval Academy. Andy Teitelbaum’s Ohio State women won the NCAA title last year.

Again, it's a very abridged list.

There is one more thing to know about all these crew alumni. They fund the men’s program. The boats, the trucks that carry them, the boathouse, the coaches’ salaries, all of it. No subsidies here.

Now, here’s where this get personal. I rowed at Rutgers, too briefly, which is why I was passionately against the university reducing the men’s program to club status and wrote several columns railing against it. Somehow, those columns resonated with my middle son, who never rowed before but he walked on as freshman, as most Rutgers rowers do. He says it’s the best thing he’s ever done, and I know it, because I remember being on the river, working with seven other guys in unison, cutting through the water, oblivious to the cars and trains and life, caring about nothing but the stroke.

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