Senior Matt O’Leary, co-captain of the Harvard’s Men’s Lightweight Crew Team, has led the team to a number one national ranking this season.

The path to becoming a rower is different for every person. Rowing is Harvard’s oldest sport but it is not widely practiced in high schools and requires significant dedication from a young age, so for the budding athlete it may not always be the obvious choice.

But for lightweight co-captain Matt O’Leary, rowing has always been a part of his life.

His mother, Liz O’Leary, is the current women’s heavyweight coach at Harvard and has been coaching rowing since before Matt was born. The Westwood, Mass., native has been running around the Harvard boathouse since he was two years old.

“You can’t grow up not knowing about the sport if you grow up in the boathouse,” Matt said. “I started rowing in seventh grade.”

Liz had a distinguished career as a rower, competing for the U.S. national team at the Olympic Games in 1976 and 1980, and then coaching the team itself in 1988.

Perhaps surprisingly then, both mother and son agree it was not his familial ties to rowing which led him to where he is today.

“I never thought [it was inevitable],” Matt said. “I always wanted to be a hockey player.”

Liz too recalled Matt trying a number of sports. As a kid he played baseball, soccer, and hockey at various times, and even had his dad coach him in lacrosse.

“He certainly knew he wanted to play something,” Liz said. “He was a hockey goalie. That was his primary sport when he was younger.”

While Matt cannot remember what drew him to rowing in the first place, his mother offered up one explanation.

“The thing about Matt is [that] he likes to do things just a little bit differently,” Liz said. “If he’s on the hockey team, he wants to be the goalie, and of all the sports you could choose for a spring sport, [he thought], ‘what would be the most off the beaten track?’ That will be [rowing] in most high school environments, [so] that’s what he did…. I don’t think it had much to do with me.”

Whatever his reasons for starting out, as he moved through high school, Matt was still competing in a number of sports as a talented athlete, with crew simply comprising the spring portion of his athletic year.

As in the case of many athletes, though, it was the arrival of a coach which changed Matt’s path permanently.

“[High school crew coach Gavin Grant] is the reason I’m here,” Matt said. “If he hadn’t showed up, we would have stayed as a pretty average team, and I probably wouldn’t have kept rowing in college. But he showed us how to train hard, how to win races. That pretty much transformed what I wanted to do in college and afterwards."

Grant came to Noble and Greenough School as a coach at the beginning of Matt’s junior year and rapidly created a culture of success.