Finding Her Coxing Voice: Zoe Tekeian

Winning silver on the world stage is a bittersweet moment. A medal at the international level is a seismic achievement, but being so close to victory will always sting a competitive soul.

Zoe Tekeian was in the driving seat for the US women's eight at the U23 World Rowing Championships last summer. She learned her trade on the US collegiate circuit, coxing at the University of Virginia, and is now coaching at Harvard University, which has just secured the IRA National Championship title for the second consecutive year.

Here, she talks to Nielsen Kellerman about all things coxing and how she found her coxing voice in the ultra-competitive collegiate circuit.

How did you first get into coxing?

I started coxing at age 14 through CRI in Boston - I grew quite late, so I was much smaller than my peers, and I had been told several times that coxing could suit me well. I grew up in Cambridge, MA, a few minutes' walk from the start line of the Head of the Charles, so I was exposed to rowing starting when I was very young. I did a learn-to-row camp and was taught to row for a week before switching to coxing.

What really kept you involved in the very beginning, and how has that evolved over the years?

As someone without a lot of physiological advantage or natural athletic ability, coxing allowed me to strengthen my team rather than be the weak link. I loved being part of a team and facilitating a session. I also loved the feeling of winning, not just winning races but working in practice to get the bow ball ahead.

Now, I stay involved in rowing because it is pretty much always the thing I'd rather be doing. Since graduating from university, I've coxed crews at a wide range of levels. The greatest throughline that keeps me coming back is the satisfaction of creating a turn of speed by feeling the hull and explaining how to execute a technical change.

What was your first club like, and how important were they to your growth?

Community Rowing Inc (CRI) is a massive organization that supports athletes of all ages and backgrounds. I was fortunate to cox alongside many excellent coxes, many of whom I had raced against in college. Skye Elliot is still the head coach there, and he holds coxswains to a very high standard. We were expected to know how to rig, adjust blades, manage data, and run a clean session. These expectations were reinforced with coxswain-specific coaching and direct, honest feedback.

More importantly, Skye expected his coxswains to be good teammates. I learned not to let my desire to win a selection process overshadow what the team was trying to accomplish.

How would you define your coxing style?

When I am doing my best coxing, it is concise, specific, and based on how the boat is feeling. In the US, coxswains are often encouraged to be loud and motivational. This can work well for junior crews and some college crews, but elite rowers do not need to be asked to push harder. They spend their time figuring out exactly how far they can take their fitness, power, and speed - there is not much to be gained from trying to get them to do more. Instead, I try to focus on how we can focus that intense effort to get the most out of it.

Athletes need to know three basic metrics at regular intervals: the rate, the boat speed, and the distance remaining. After this information, the next layer is adding information about other crews. Finally, I will give my rowers a task and a specific way to execute it. Asking for a power ten won't give you a unified push, but asking for faster heels on the front end gets the rowers accelerating at the same portion of the stroke.

In your opinion, what is the most important attribute a successful coxswain must imbue?

A successful coxswain must understand and embody a high-performance mentality. It can be easy to use coxing as an excuse to be less performance-oriented than your rowers. Since you aren't doing the actual rowing, it must be fine to hold yourself to a lower standard, right?

For me, the answer is no. I think the best coxswains can conceptualize what they are asking the rowers to do because they have done the work. Some coxes might erg with their crews and even test on 2k days. I always preferred running; some coxes lift. When your whole body is screaming at you to stop, you discover what keeps people going. I always go for a run before I race, and many of my best calls are ideas I think of while doing my own exercise.

How crucial is high-quality equipment (like NK) to set you up for success?

As a cox, I tend to believe that information is power. In training and racing, accurate equipment is crucial to understanding metrics like rate and speed. I have used an NK CoxBox GPS since my first year at UVA, and was fortunate to receive an athlete grant this fall to purchase one of my own. I am glad to take the guesswork out of coxing in a new environment because I know that the equipment I own will perform exactly as I need it to.

What has been your favorite coxing memory?

My favourite coxing memory is the medal ceremony from the 2024 U23 World Rowing Championships. I coxed the USA women's eight to a silver medal, which fulfilled a longtime coxing goal of medalling at a World Rowing Championships. The experience was infinitely more special, though, because I was celebrating with 14 rowers who had been my teammates that summer.

During Henley Royal Regatta 2024, I coxed an eight of women who were student-athletes in the US and were preparing for GB U23 Trials. While our Henley campaign was a short one, I was lucky to get to prepare for my own trialing process by working with those athletes. My time training with the GB athletes helped me to make the transition from collegiate to elite coxing in a lower-pressure environment. Sharing the podium with six of them was a great joy.

What was the biggest learning curve you encountered during your coxing journey, and how did you address it?

Learning to steer a straight line was extremely challenging. I struggled for a long time to visualize a point in the distance and for an even longer time to actually hold that point. I think that learning to steer straight for me came down to these skills:

1. Awareness of where the hull is pointed - this means knowing your surroundings and being able to visualize the line the hull needs to take.
2. Ability to feel how the rudder is impacting the hull. No two fin-rudder combinations feel exactly the same, and often the strings or steering mechanism are not centred. This means that keeping the hull in line requires you to feel out how that rudder is moving and to adjust your steering accordingly.
3. Be chill. Coxed boats, especially eights, don't tend to make sudden moves on their own. If you make a correction every time the hull moves a little bit, you will end up writing your name down the lane. Let the boat have a little time to take on your steering adjustment before making further adjustments. Working incrementally can help prevent you from having to recorrect in the opposite direction.

Your steering is the easiest way to make the boat move faster. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and a coach or a crew rarely favors a cox who swerves.

What is the one bit of advice you'd give to a new cox trying to find his or her voice?

Don't worry about sounding like anyone but yourself. There are many excellent recordings on YouTube and other online platforms, but it's essential not to replicate those calls directly. Instead, remember that the specific calls those coxes are making probably link to something specific for their crew. Taking a call away from its context removes its power. Instead, focus on what your coach and crew say in practice that effectively makes the boat move faster. You can condense it to a single word or short phrase and explain it in training.

When I was coxing the U23 women's eight this summer, our coach noticed that we sometimes had trouble shifting from high strokes to a strong base rhythm. We talked in training about using the power in the drive phase to set the rhythm into the hull, rather than using rate and hoping power would come along with it. This became our power-based rhythm: PBR (not like the beer). In our heat at the World Rowing Championships, we were a few seats down on Australia and not in our longest or most effective rhythm. I knew we needed a reset to our base pace, so I pulled out the PBR call. This refocus brought everyone onto the same page about how we needed to be moving, and we were able to walk through and place first by the narrowest of margins.