Exonian Profiles
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Karen Prazar ’99: Rowing by the Seat of
Her Pants
The entire student body knows Becky Moore’s English classroom in Phillips Hall. The door is usually covered with rowing news, including announcements, and one-which called for rowers for the Junior National team-struck a chord in Karen Prazar ’99. “I have always looked on life as an adventure;” she explains. Her initiation into crew, which included rough conditions and being towed by a fishing boat on her first day out on the water, fit this pattern. Her mother says she couldn’t help but notice how excited her daughter was the day she came home from her first rowing adventure. “Karen was a strong technical rower from the start,” says Becky Moore, girls crew coach, “and she improved rapidly, so fast, in fact, that as a lower she was rowing second varsity boat.” From November to April, mostly on her own, she trained to increase her strength and submitted erg scores, in hope of securing an invitation to attend the selection camp in Philadelphia, in June. In six days of tryouts, Karen established herself as one of America’s best young rowers. Twenty-two girls attended, with 11 being ultimately chosen to represent the United States at the Junior World Championships in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The squad the U.S. sent to Plovdiv was less experienced than the competition, but, against strong odds, the four weeks of intense training had made the junior women’s eight a coherent unit. “In hot, fast conditions, the plucky Americans maintained a good position as the field began to string out in the second 1000,” wrote Rowing News, describing the girl’s second-place finish. The medal they won was the only one awarded to an American team. Karen explains the team’s success this way: Once the teams . were set, we had a common goal. There was never any incident that caused tension among the girls, who became as close as sisters. “We were determined to pull it off,” she said in retrospect. As one of two Americans who rowed both the four- and eight-person shells, Karen was in an enviable position. She got to compete in two races. “That was kind of neat;” she said. This winter, Karen has deferred attendance at Brown University and is working for the U.S. Forest Service in the rainforest of Puerto Rico. While her former national team crew mates are preparing for more elite levels of rowing, Karen is immersed in biological and field research on eagles habitat. Having achieved one ambitious goal, she is confident of future successes whatever she decides to do. But don’t pin me down, she says, “I want to do what I want to do and fly by the seat of my pants:’ —Janice Reiter |
