The ROWING NEWS Interview: Ellen Minzner

What excites Ellen Minzner, USRowing’s director of Para high performance, is the current team’s youth. The athletes going to the Paris Paralympics have a new look and energy—and real speed.

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Ellen Minzner serves as USRowing’s director of Para high performance, a title that describes her work responsibilities but doesn’t begin to tell the story of her career as a champion of actual inclusion, equity, and accomplishment in the sport of rowing.

At Community Rowing, Inc. in Boston, Minzner and her colleagues developed programs that welcomed people with disabilities, underserved youth, and military veterans. Her pioneering work has served as a model for similar programs across the country, and through her current efforts, she’s advancing not only U.S. Para crews but also the sport as a whole.

Minzner is also a two-time world champion athlete who won the lightweight women’s pair at the 1995 and 1996 World Rowing Championships with Christine Smith-Collins.

Rowing News caught up with Minzner at Community Rowing as the U.S. Para PR3 mixed four and mixed double prepared for the Paris Paralympic Games, which will take place Aug. 30 to Sept. 1 at the Vaires-sur-Marne basin in Paris.

Both crews won silver medals at the 2023 World Rowing Championships, and the four carries the U.S. run of Para silvers—all behind Great Britain—into the Paris Games.

Rowing News: It’s been a successful run. What are you most proud of?

The thing I’m most proud of is the growth of the Para and inclusion events at Youth Nationals and Head of the Charles. That took a lot of work. We basically have to build our own pipeline. So most people just see that it has been successful at the top, which is great—I am super proud of all the medals we’ve been able to win—but when a kid at Youth Nationals says, “I just love seeing all the other competitors in this event and getting to talk to everyone and knowing that I’m not the only one because I am the only one at my boat club.”

I am really proud that rowing is something that young people want to come out for in the Paralympic boat classes. I hope that continues to grow.

Rowing News: That’s been part of your success on the elite level, getting more athletes from the colleges than from people who were Para athletes first and then came to rowing? You’re finding the Para among the already rowing?

The way to compete, especially in the PR3 boat class, is you have to come at it with a highly competitive background before you come into Para rowing. It was mainly about realizing that there’s probably way more people with Paralympic eligibility than even I was aware of.

The collegiate coaches were probably not aware that they had the opportunity to put an athlete on the highest stage who may or may not be able to make their top boat. So we spent a couple of years just doing straight-up email campaigns to college rowers and college coaches saying, “Hey, by the way, you may have an athlete on your squad. This is the kind of experience an athlete on your squad with Paralympic eligibility could have if they were to come out for our squad and make a national team.”

That’s how we got a lot of referrals. Many weren’t eligible, but that’s OK because they’re coming to us now as opposed to our having to go and find athletes. We had a very successful selection camp this year. It was a combined camp with the PR3 double and the PR3 four. Even to get invited was tough, because it was a very competitive camp.

What I’m really proud of is that it’s really hard to make these boats, especially in the PR3 boat class. And with some of the young people who come out for Youth Nationals, and our development camp, and Canadian Henley program, we’re getting there also in the fixed-seat boat classes.

We’re trying to provide a way for fixed-seat athletes to find their way to the international level without the infrastructure of a U23 and a U19 world-championship program. That’s something that’s now being discussed. Once we begin identifying younger talent and giving them more opportunity to race, we’ll have more success in the fixed-seat boat classes.

Rowing News: Lightweight rowing is getting cut out of the Olympics because of arguments like “People don’t understand it” and “Those athletes have an opportunity to row in the open class, so they don’t need a special one.” Those same bad arguments could be applied to Para. Do you think that’s a threat?

There is some conversation about changing the Paralympic program. Paralympic rowing is still fairly new—2008 was the first Paralympics for rowing. And we’re still looking at the program. The big change, to move the PR3 double from a world championship to a Paralympic event, was a positive one.

Some events, when they’re not part of the Olympic program, struggle for a subscription in any given year. But we have an eye toward developing the sport overall with World Rowing.

Paralympic rowing is awesome. It’s here to stay. It’s a matter of how we define our sport and our universality.

Rowing News: And what’s holding it back? Equipment?

It’s time we revisit what’s best for the athlete in terms of safety and competitive speed. The level of athletes who are coming out for Paralympic rowing is better and better each year. And the athletes deserve to be in something that is bespoke to them, that works for them.

In Paralympic boat classes for PR1, PR2, there’s essentially one weight range [of boats]. That’s difficult because you have very big athletes whom the boats don’t fit and you have to change the whole structure of how you position the rigger on the hull. You can’t achieve the seat-to-heel height differential you want because the boat is so shallow.

To make that work, you’re putting the athlete higher. Then you’re putting the rigger higher, and soon enough, you’re losing stability. So I’m a fan of taking a look at what’s best for the athlete. There are all kinds of designs and technology that exist right now for almost no cost.

We should be entertaining ideas and talking to the athletes about what’s going to work for them, not only in terms of speed but also in terms of the health of athletes who have high-level impairments having to row the heaviest boat in the sport. It’s a problem.

Why is weight a big factor? Couldn’t we look to something like canoe and kayak, where it’s similar to the open program and you can do whatever you want within certain parameters?  

The one-design approach to PR1 and PR2 isn’t all that helpful because it ends up not working for any individual, really. It takes quite a lot of time and effort on the coaches’ part to do some basic geometry that we would set up in no time in an open boat. It’s time we really look at the equipment.

Rowing News: In Paris, what can fans look forward to out of the USA?

The real excitement is the youth of our team right now. We’ve got our senior guy in Todd [Vogt], but for the most part what these athletes bring is a new look and a new energy. They’ve got some speed, and it’s really up to them what they’re going to do out there.

It’s really exciting—the enthusiasm that we’ve had for Para rowing, the young people who are looking to this crew and saying, “Hey, I could be there in two or three years.”

We’ve got some youthful enthusiasm and we’re going to look to capitalize on that when we get to the racecourse.

Rowing News: Can you beat the Brits?

Of course we can. The question is, Will we?

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