So as Jamie dismantled the collegiate field and was named to the Olympic four headed to Athens, Griffin bought into coach Charley Butt’s advice about technique. He had the genes, he had the erg scores, and he had the competitive spirit with his brother keeping him going—all he had to do was put Butt’s advice to work.
“He really dedicated himself to making the varsity,” teammate Dave Stephens says. “The odds are stacked against you if you’re not a recruit, but he worked on his technique and got really good.”
As a senior, Griffin made the varsity lightweight eight and is just one of two non-recruits on the country’s No. 1 boat.
“That’s absolutely fantastic,” his brother Jamie says. “I couldn’t be more proud of him.”
Whereas Jamie’s Stanford boat is No. 5 in the national heavyweight polls and placed third at the Pac 10 Championships, the Harvard lightweights headed to IRAs in Camden, N.J. as the Eastern Sprints champions and the country’s No. 1 lightweight crew.
And Griffin isn’t buying the heavyweight-lightweight distinction. Perhaps it is just long-standing arrogance as the childhood champion of a sibling rivalry, but Griffin remains confident his boat could outduel the Cardinal.
“Our time [5:49.0 on April 30] beat the heavyweight number six, Northeastern,” Griffin says. “And Stanford is fifth, so that puts us—according to my fantasy calculations—right up there with them.”
Jamie, true to the sibling rivalry, disagrees.
“I think it’s pretty unlikely,” he says. “Heavyweight boats are a lot faster.”
Their on-the-water battle—unlike one-on-one basketball games or swimming races—will remain theoretical for the Schroeder brothers. At Camden, Griffin’s eight rowed in the lightweight championship final, Jamie’s in the heavyweight petite final. The former finished fourth, while the latter took first place in his race, earning a seventh place finish overall at nationals.
It was a family reunion of sorts, a culmination of 21 years of competition, all boiling down to two 2,000 meter races and endless hypotheses as to whose boat was really the better one.
But Griffin, armed with an Eastern Sprints title, need not worry that his reign as sibling rivalry champion is all together over.
—Staff writer Aidan E. Tait can be reached at atait@fas.harvard.edu.