There’s some unofficial advice that tends to float through Newell Boathouse prior to ergometer speed tests.

Even for experienced oarsmen, there’s always the knowledge that immense lactic acid buildup—as common to rowing as outfield grass is to baseball—will welcome them after 2,000 exhausting meters on the erg.

Perhaps some rowers are told to pace themselves—to take the first 500 meters hard, to settle into a steady base cadence, to take a 20-stroke sprint at the 1,000 meter mark. To go all out at the finish: they’re racing, after all, even though they remain in one painful spot for 2,000 meters.

But that’s not it. Everybody—every Harvard rower, at least—has heard the same words before.

Don’t sit next to Dave Stephens. Now there’s some advice.

“He’s incredible,” says varsity lightweight bowman Nick Downing. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The heavyweights ask our erg scores and say, ‘Remind me not to get on an erg next to that guy.’”

“You sit next to him on the erg, you weigh the exact same thing he does,” varsity three-seat Griffin Schroeder adds, “and he just pulls the chain so much harder. He’s got it.”

He’s got more than skill on the erg, according to Schroeder and Downing.

“The guy is really, really clever,” Downing says. “You meet a lot of smart people at Harvard, but Dave is extraordinarily smart. He’s really sharp.”

Stephens transferred to Harvard after two years at the University of Toronto, where he was an engineering major. In his first semester at Harvard, Stephens signed up for the notorious Economics 1011a.

“Not only did he take it,” Schroeder recalls, “but it met at 8:30 a.m., and we had practice in the mornings. He didn’t tell [Harvard coach Charley Butt] that he had class at that time because he didn’t want to inconvenience the team. So he went to class once and got a flat A.”

Back in the erg room, Stephens first caught Butt’s eye in his first trip to CRASH-Bs, the world’s premier indoor rowing competition. Under Butt’s watch, Stephens sat down on an erg and churned out a 6:20.3. A high school senior two months too old for the junior division, Stephens placed 30th in the collegiate lightweight division. It was just weeks after the Harvard application deadline, so Stephens went back to Canada.

“When I first started rowing, it turned out that I was pretty good on the erg,” he says. “I actually beat everyone on my team [at Nicholson Catholic College in Ontario] in my first attempt on the erg.”

“So they weren’t very good,” he adds, laughing.

Stevens no longer has that excuse.