Co-captain Rachel Rauh has competed in the Head of the Charles for four years. This weekend, she will lead Radcliffe’s top boat for the second straight time.

It’s always fun to buck the trend. Just ask Rachel Rauh.

The senior is the first coxswain in over two decades to be named captain of Radcliffe women’s heavyweight crew.

“I was really surprised...and very honored,” Rauh says. “[I was] really excited to be able to lead the charge with the team and take it where I want it.”

But her path to the top has had its fair share of bumps.

Rauh began crew her freshman year of high school at Phillips Academy Andover as a coxswain in one of the lower boats. She wasn’t thrilled by the sport—at least initially.

“I was pretty ambivalent about it,” the Leverett House resident says, “but then I started to fall in love with it.”

From there, Rauh’s stock began to rise as she moved to higher boats, finally reaching the top boat during her senior year at Andover. Her coxing abilities caught the eye of the Radcliffe coaches, who snagged Rauh as a recruit.

But once she got to Cambridge, it was back to the bottom. Her freshman year, Rauh manned the novice eight, the lowest heavyweight crew boat. The following season, she coxed the second varsity eight and the varsity four.

Then everything changed her junior year. Motivated by what she saw as a disappointing sophomore season, Rauh set a lofty goal: cox the first boat at the Head of the Charles Regatta.

“She came up to me in the fall and just said...something along the lines of, ‘I don’t care what I have to do, I’m coxing the first boat for the Head of the Charles,’” senior Olivia Coffey recounts, laughing. “And I was like, ‘All right, let’s see it.’”

That’s when Rauh kicked it into full gear.

“Every practice, when we were on the course, she was always taking the turns as she would in the Head of the Charles,” Coffey adds. “Every day, she was on it, and I knew at that point that she was going to have the first boat for the Head of the Charles. And she did.”

But Rauh’s climb to the pinnacle of Radcliffe crew was not finished. An even bigger surprise came seven months after the Head of the Charles, when the athletes voted Rauh one of two captains for this season. Fittingly, Coffey—Rauh’s teammate at Andover—is the other.

Typically, rowers, and not coxswains, are captains because, as the logic goes, a captain needs to be a leader not only on the water but also in the physically demanding workouts in which coxswains usually do not participate. This explains why the team had not selected a coxswain as captain since 1989.

And this is where Rauh differs.

“Rachel, more than any other coxswain here, does as much as she can—almost like physically as much as she can,” Coffey explains. “She’ll come to our weights practices, and she works out on her own, because she has the mentality of an athlete, and she has this desire to compete.”

Rauh does more for the team than simply attend workouts. She’s a top-notch coxswain, but perhaps more importantly, she is a remarkably effective leader.

“She motivates people to want to pull harder during races,” sophomore Scout Moran says. “She’s just someone you want to impress.”

And as with many great leaders, Rauh’s faith in her team is unflappable.

“In the first day of practice this year,” Moran recalls, “she stood up and she’s like, ‘Hey, look around. This is a really fast team.’ And she kind of [talked] about how we need to get there.”

Rauh’s election as captain came as no surprise to Moran.

“[She] has every quality that you would want your team captain to have,” Moran notes. “I’m a big fan.”

And though the team’s selection of a coxswain as captain was unusual, Radcliffe coach Liz O’Leary understands the decision.

“They respect Rachel for her...enthusiasm and spirit and loyalty to the team,” O’Leary says. “[She demonstrates] loyalty to her teammates, to her team, [and] to the sort of values and principles and goals that we have.”

The senior will try to put these leadership skills to use in this weekend’s Head of the Charles Regatta, where she will cox the top boat in the fall’s most important event for the second straight year. And in characteristic Rauh style, she is ready for the challenge.

“We’re excited to just kind of go after it, see if we can win it, see how fast we can get boats down the course,” Rauh says. “It’ll be a lot of fun.”