It’s easy to marvel at how Bucknell student-athletes find the time and energy to excel in their academic pursuits while also training and competing at the highest level of college athletics. But many of those student-athletes would tell you that they would not be able to succeed in one of those areas without the other. That the rigors of being a Division I athlete and a student at a world-class university provide a daily structure that allows them to flourish in both.
That symbiotic partnership between academia and sports certainly holds true for senior rower Haley Beardsley.
A native of the South Hills suburb of Pittsburgh, Haley is a first-generation college student who arrived at Bucknell in the midst of the pandemic. Coming from a bit of a blended family, she left behind two baby brothers – a third sibling, a sister this time, is now one year old – and the sport of softball, which was once her main passion, in order to embark on a brand new journey.
Haley recalls that attending college was not fully on her radar until she was preparing for her junior year at Upper St. Clair High School. Her father, Matthew, is a union man in Pittsburgh, following in his family’s footsteps as a steamfitter who worked his way up from apprentice to welding pipes to job foreman. Her mother, Amelia, was once a dental assistant who more recently has started her own business flipping houses.
“We’re a handy family,” Haley says with pride. “We certainly know how to put things together. I’m very grateful to have this blue-collar family. My parents and grandparents didn’t go to college, but they know how to work hard and care for the people around them.”
Coming from that family background, it was never a given that Haley would pursue a college track, but then she learned that her high school had an International Baccalaureate program, an intense curriculum designed for high school juniors and seniors. The IB track requires final exams in six subjects, but it is also designed to promote critical thinking on a global scale, and the diploma is generally recognized around the world.
“I was approached by a few of my teachers who thought I might be a good fit for the IB program, and my first question was, ‘What is the benefit?’. Well, the benefit is that it prepares you for college and what comes after. So that was when I first started to think about college. At first, I thought I might go somewhere international, wherever my grades would take me. But then my mom had my brother, and I knew I didn’t want to go that far away. I drew a circle around my house on the map and tried to find the most academically rigorous experience that I could find within a reasonable distance.”
Bucknell not only checked those boxes, but two of Haley’s former classmates had gone to Bucknell and had great things to report. She drove out to Lewisburg by herself, stayed with her friends, and visited the Admissions office to learn all about foreign concepts such as financial aid and the enrollment process.
“I remember coming back from that weekend feeling very supported. They took all of my dumb questions in stride. My first experience at Bucknell was that I’m not at all sure what I’m doing, but these people are going to help me figure it out.”
When Haley arrived at Bucknell in the fall of 2020, group activities were still limited due to the pandemic, but she knew that she needed a physical outlet. Haley grew up playing a variety of youth sports, but by high school she focused primarily on softball, where she was a standout catcher. She earned varsity letters all four years at Upper St. Clair, garnered all-league honors as a junior and senior, and also played on the club softball circuit in the summer. But ultimately Haley chose not to pursue softball in college. She recalls being a bit burned out by the busy club schedule and admits to being “kind of freaked out” by the intensity of the college recruiting process. Then her senior season ended prematurely because of COVID, and while her competitive softball career was over, she was not ready to write the final chapter of her athletic career.
At the time, Haley recalls with a laugh that she didn’t even realize that rowing was a sport. Her high school had a crew team, but she thought all they did was use the erg machines right next to the weight room. But then she started to receive some emails from the Bucknell rowing team. Every year, head coach Steve Kish and head novice coach Kelly Harris reach out to the first-year class in search of rowers. Three words stuck out to Haley: No. Experience. Necessary.
Bucknell proudly maintains a robust and well-staffed novice program. While some of those beginners give it a try and move on to something else, many fall in love with the sport, dedicate themselves to training and technique, and eventually become full-fledged varsity rowers competing for Patriot League championships. Haley and classmate Abby Gerst are two current examples of novice success stories. They are the only two seniors still going from the 2020-21 novice class, and both will be important parts of the crews Kish sends out for the league championship regatta later this month.
“After I started getting these emails, I was pushed to try it, I think mostly because I was looking for ways to connect with other people, but also because I was definitely missing that competitive drive. Athletics has always brought a lot of structure to my day. The physical activity makes me feel a lot more grounded.”
In a normal year, the novices get going in the fall semester, but because of the pandemic, Haley’s class did not start until the spring semester, most of which was spent on the erg machines. She says the first time she actually stepped into a boat, she felt lucky her group didn’t sink it, or else go tumbling over the dam downstream on the Susquehanna River.
“The first time I got into a boat, oh my goodness. They put us in two novice eights with one or two coaches out there with us. I just remember my boat rocking back and forth, flopping from side to side. Nobody knew how to move anything, nobody knew what this thing in our hand was. My boat kind of figured out how to make a stroke, and then we watched the other boat get closer and closer to the dam, and I was just thinking, ‘What did I get myself into?’”
For someone who was used to digging her cleats into the dirt on a softball diamond, Haley’s new sport came with a huge learning curve. Fortunately, she already knew how to put the work in off the water, and the rest started to come naturally. She and Abby tried out and made the varsity squad during the fall of their sophomore year, and Haley competed with the Third Varsity Eight and the Second Varsity Four throughout the year.
“We made the team and entered the varsity training regimen, and I think it started to click for me that spring when I had the absolute honor and opportunity to watch and train with some of the best rowers that our program has ever seen.”
Indeed, Bucknell’s Varsity Eight made history at the 2022 Patriot League Championships. After posting the fifth-fastest qualifying time in the morning preliminary heats, the Bison improved their time by 28 seconds in the final and defeated runner-up Boston University by more than seven seconds and third-place Navy by more than nine. It was the third-largest margin of victory in the Varsity Eight final in league history and the largest since Bucknell defeated Navy by nearly 15 seconds back in 2008.
Haley pictured herself in that gold-medal-winning boat someday, and she immersed herself in the video room with former assistant coach Dawson Shyne-Appignani. They watched hours and hours of film, studying other rowers’ strokes and picking apart Haley’s.
“All of those sessions helped me visually understand how intricate the stroke is. At that point I was telling myself to just pull, just use your legs. But it came together that spring when I got to watch my other teammates succeed, and I made the most of all of those extra hours of development.”
Haley spent part of the following summer on campus, and she rowed in a single, which greatly helped her understanding of how a boat moves. By the spring of her junior year, Haley was rowing in the top boat – the Varsity Eight – for the very first time. She sat in the 2 seat at the Patriot League Championships, and even though they could not recapture the magic from the previous year, her 1V8+ still finished a very strong fourth.
This year, Haley is in the all-important “stroke” seat in the Second Varsity Eight, while Abby Gerst strokes the 1V8+. The stroke seat directly faces the coxswain and is the rower closest to the stern of the boat. Not only is the stroke typically the most skilled member of the boat, but they are tasked with communicating with the coxswain to establish the crew’s stroke rate and the rhythm of the boat.
It would generally be considered a remarkable achievement for two former novices to earn that level of responsibility in the team’s top two championship boats, but Bucknell has seen graduates of the novice program go on to win league medals in the past. It has become an important part of the team’s culture, and its success.
“Haley came in with no preconceived notions of what rowing should be,” said Harris, who has already helped a handful of current novice freshmen earn seats in the top two boats this spring. “Haley was a blank slate, and we love that. That’s what makes novice rowing so special. Could you imagine taking someone who had never picked up a basketball in their lives until they were 18 years old and asking them to make a shot to help you win a championship game? This year, Haley and Abby are the examples that we can point to for our young rowers, and they take their leadership roles very seriously. Haley is a very thoughtful leader.”
“I think I’ve definitely been able to connect with a few of the younger members of the team, even just outside of rowing. Bucknell is one of the few schools left that has this robust of a novice program, with athletes going from the novice to the top boats. It’s an incredibly difficult position to be in. The imposter syndrome is through the roof. It’s really hard to be sitting next to somebody who has been doing this sport for 10 years and you just joined. But I also think that there’s a level of respect from the recruited rowers for the novices who have shown the dedication, put in the work, and shown everyone that they want to do this really well.”
Off the water, Haley has not just survived as a first-generation college student, she has thrived. She carries a robust 3.92 cumulative grade-point average as an English literary studies major with minors in digital humanities and women and gender studies. She has worked as an editorial intern with the Bucknell University Press, and she has done undergraduate research digitizing and preserving Heresies Magazine, a feminist publication covering art and politics that was published at Bucknell from 1977-93.
Haley originally planned to study international relations, but in the fall of her sophomore year, she took an English class with Professor Michael Drexler that changed the way she thought conceptually about literature.
“I adore my English department. They have supported me in so many different capacities. When I took that class with Professor Drexler, I realized that I could study theory and conceptual thinking within literature and not within politics. So that’s when I pushed in that direction and was connected to my research advisors and started doing more and more from there. Then I joined the digital humanities department, and it’s been kind of like a little web of people that just keep connecting me to others.”
Haley’s work on the Heresies Project led to an opportunity to travel to Graz, Austria for the Digital Humanities International Conference last summer. It was a valuable networking experience, and the trip helped shape the next chapter of Haley’s journey, one that will likely take her to graduate school – and a continuation of her rowing career – overseas next year. During her time at Bucknell, Haley also traveled to Bath, England to study the works of Jane Austen, and to Spain for the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage.
It’s not lost on Haley that it was a relatively short time ago when she was not sure she would go to college, and she certainly never dreamed of competing at a Division I conference rowing championship. Now she’s going to do graduate-level study abroad while continuing to pursue her new passion on the water.
“It’s been a crazy trajectory, but it’s been absolutely phenomenal. I didn’t even know it was possible to compete and excel at this sort of level. I had no clue what I was doing when I was applying to colleges, and now I’m here. This school and this athletic program and my community of rowers and friends, family, everybody, they just keep pushing me in the right direction. We just had our senior Oar Ceremony, and I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting. Nothing – no opportunity or achievement at Bucknell – would have been possible without rowing. That decision to randomly show up to a novice thing in the depths of cold weather in the spring semester of my freshman year was the greatest cosmic universe, stars-aligning moment I think I could have ever dreamed. It pushed me in ways I never knew were possible.”
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