This story starts in the backyard, in the driveway, and in the swimming pool—in every place two brothers compete for athletic superiority.

It starts there and ends up all over the place: in Palo Alto, in Cambridge, in Athens, and in Camden, N.J. At issue is how it got to Cambridge—to Newell Boathouse. In the aisles of Harvard’s rowing palace, that is where this story begins again.

It is a place varsity lightweight three-seat Griffin Schroeder might call home, at least during the spring. And it is a place he might never have gone were it not for his older brother, Jamie, a senior in Stanford’s varsity eight.

When Griffin suffered an ankle injury that kept him out of his last high school track season, Jamie—then a standout freshman at Stanford—suggested rowing.

“[Jamie] had made the Under-23 National Team,” Griffin recalls, “and he told me, ‘Switch to crew, it’s much more fun.’”

The younger Schroeder followed his brother’s advice, spending his first year in the second freshman lightweight eight at Harvard. He was new to the sport, competing against recruits who had been rowing for years.

What was it about crew—about enduring frozen Cambridge winters and exhausting erg tests and nerve-racking seat races—that kept him tying into his foot stretchers as a freshman?

“It’s a personal thing between me and my brother,” Griffin says, laughing. “That’s what crew has been to me.”

His older brother, meanwhile, has been a fixture in the Cardinal varsity boat. Both came to college as novices, but the 6’8, 225-pound Jamie possessed the archetypal crew body that Griffin—a bona fide lightweight at 6’2, 155—didn’t have.

“He has legs the size of my torso,” Griffin says. “I didn’t have that shock and awe advantage right off the line, but I trusted that I had whatever genetic advantage it is that he has.”

The elder, bigger Schroeder flew to Boston for the CRASH-B indoor rowing championships in February 2002, completely anonymous to the rowing community. Griffin shared a boathouse with an incredible Harvard heavyweight crew and fully expected his brother to get routed.

“As a freshman, I said, ‘The guys here are amazing, Jamie. You’re going to get beat bad,’” Griffin remembers. “And he comes out to CRASH-Bs and wins the whole thing.”

Griffin, who dominated the sibling athletic rivalry throughout their childhood, watched as his brother transformed into an international phenom. He watched, first as a member of the second freshman boat, then the third varsity boat, and eventually the second varsity boat as a junior.

Each year, Griffin moved up the Newell hierarchy. And all the while, Jamie piled up recognition from USRowing.

The younger Schroeder was left to contend with a stacked group of Harvard lightweight recruits, and despite his talent on the erg, his technique was lacking.