With a last name that means "oar" in Latin, Dana A. Remus '97 seemed destined to row. The sport has helped transform the senior heavyweight crew captain from a skinny, uncoordinated kid to the leader of a winning boat this year, which will try out for the U.S. National Rowing Team.

According to teammates and family, hard work and discipline have led to overwhelming and unexpected success on the water. According to her mother, Ann, Remus has always embodied her grandfather's favorite quotation: "Anything worth doing is worth doing well."

These traits will be tested when she enters the rigorous National Team tryouts in San Francisco this summer.

Crew was not Dana's first love. As a child growing up in Bedford, New Hampshire, Dana was an academic stand-out who lacked athletic ability, which she attributes to "no eye-hand coordination."

But the summer before she was to depart for St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, her father, worried that she would bring no athletic skills to a boarding school that required every student to play sports, tried teaching her squash. After attempting squash, track and cross-country skiing, the skinny Remus finally was convinced by her older sister that crew was a sport that didn't require coordination but rather hard work, something that Remus was used to as an industrious student.

Remus fell in love with rowing and at 14 began working hard to increase her strength and stamina by running and working out.

Her mother recalls that from child-hood Remus liked setting goals and accomplishing them.

Remus says she was never a star in high school--where her main sport was cross-country--and she wasn't recruited to row in college. But she says it took only one day at the Weld Boathouse "to realize that Radcliffe Crew was incredible."

"My freshman year, it was just an unbelievable team with a contagious spirit," she says. "The seniors embodied everything I wanted to be and they subsumed to the team as a whole, all the while having so much fun."

Remus' determination that her team be the best fills her voice when she describes her discouraging sophomore and junior Years, when the first heavy-weight boat came in only seventh and eleventh respectively.

"I was a basket-case. My mission was to get Radcliffe fast. I worked my ass off because I was convinced I could do it myself," says Remus, Now 5'10" and 138 lbs.

Radcliffe Heavyweight Coach Elizabeth H. O'Leary, Dana's coach for the past three years, attests to Dana's incredible hard work, dedication, and commitment to excellence.

"She works hard to be the best and it has been amazing to see her physical growth as well as her mental focus improve," she says.

Now at the end of her Harvard years, Dana scolds herself for arrogantly thinking that she alone could improve the team. Even as she worked harder, the boat kept getting slower.

This year, though, things were different. With new coaches and new blood in the boat house, the team began a "mission from hell," doubling their training time and, Remus says, tripling their mental intensity.