After a long weekend wrangling 5,000 high school scullers at the Midwest Scholastic Rowing Championships at Kensington Metropark, Skyline crew coach Kit Bennett sounds exhilarated and exhausted. He not only founded the event last year and co-organized it both years, but he coached his scullers this year to five gold medals, six silvers, and two bronzes with both the women’s and the men’s teams coming in first on points.
Hired in 2009 to start Skyline crew when he was just twenty-four years old, Bennett has grown the teams from twenty-five athletes to an average of seventy and as many as eighty-five. “We’ve won seven national titles,” he says proudly. “Fifty-five-plus Midwest championships. We were state champions as a team last year.”
When he’s coaching, though, “we don’t talk about [winning], because there’s really a tacit understanding as an athlete that you would probably like to win,” he laughs.
Bennett himself rowed as a teenager in southwest London, inspired by his older brother, Pip. “I always looked up to him,” Bennett emails. “He has an incredible work ethic and moral compass.”
His path to Skyline began “back in 2003 where I was a camp counselor at Camp Copneconic in Fenton, Michigan, which is part of the Flint YMCA. I did it at the end of my gap year in the UK before going to college.” That’s where he met his future wife, Kat. “Yes, we’re Kit and Kat, just to get that out of the way.
“We dated for three-and-a-half years long distance,” he continues. “Then I moved out to the States for a master’s in education at U of M.” He was assistant coach at Pioneer for two years and “then Skyline got built. They needed a head coach, and I applied for the job, and the rest is history … though I think I was the only person that applied for the job!”
Lindsay Davis-Brady, now Skyline’s associate head coach, was one of Bennett’s first rowers, in 2010. Crew “is definitely the hardest physical thing I have ever done,” she says, but “there’s really nothing like going through the finish line literally staring at your competition because they’re behind you!” In 2013, she and Ella Bourland won Skyline’s first national title, in the women’s double.
This year’s women’s senior captain, Grace Lee, recalls that when she started rowing as a freshman, Bennett told her, “I wanna be someone you can talk back to, to have a good banter with, so feel free to joke with me, to laugh with me.”
At the same time, she says, he “sets a high bar for all of us, and he expects us to meet it, and that pushes us to be great athletes.” His goal, she says, “is always to create people who are capable and respectful and know how to put in hard work.”
“The moment you meet Coach Bennett, you’ll know he lives and breathes rowing,” emails Rebecca Lazarus, a former AAPS trustee who’s currently on the board of Columbia Blue Crew, the team’s 501(c)(3) booster club. “His coaching style is tough, but compassionate and fair.”
Lazarus writes that her son “had never rowed before in his life,” but after his first fall season, “he was hooked. Resulting in our son’s grades improving, becoming more focused, and eating healthier.”
When Ann Arbor Education Association president Fred Klein’s daughter came back from freshman orientation saying she wanted to do crew, “we had no clue about what it was,” Klein laughs. At the parent orientation he realized, “Whoa, this is a huge commitment, not just for the kid, but for the family.”
Klein ended up as president of the crew, and his daughter thrived as a rower. “She won a national championship in New Jersey in the double her junior year,” he says. “And then she won a bronze medal at the World University Games in China”—and then won a rowing scholarship to MSU.
Like his athletes, Bennett likes to win. But says what keeps him coaching “is that development piece of seeing fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds grow up and develop into great people. It’s the best thing in the world!”
In addition to Skyline crew and the Midwest Scholastic Rowing Championships, Bennett started the Washtenaw Rowing Center in 2012. They began with six kids, and this year “just had sixty-five middle schoolers sign up for the spring session.”
The center shares space on the Huron at Concordia University with the Skyline team. It’s open to middle school kids from around the county year-round and hosts high school and college high-performance and development camps in the summer. Bennett says the goal for middle schoolers is “to expose them to rowing and just show them how much fun it is. For the high school kids, it’s just reaching out to the local programs and seeing if their kids in the summer want somewhere to go to support what they’re doing at their home [training] programs.”
Two years ago, the center purchased the Kensington Metropark course for the Midwest Scholastic Rowing Championships with a federal Small Business Administration loan plus local fundraising. Bennett named it the Kathryn Bennett Race Course at Maple Beach, after his wife, for her support of rowing.
This month, the course is hosting the first national USRowing Women’s Selection Development Camp—another Bennett creation. After training for three and a half weeks, “we then go race at the U.S. Club Summer Nationals [in Ohio]. In phase two they have the option to come to Canadian Henley [Sculling and Sweep Camp in Ontario] and get some more racing experience.”
The Bennetts’ family has grown along with his teams: the couple are parents to sons Finn and Henry, both at Abbot Elementary. Finn “swims and plays soccer,” their father reports, while Henry “plays flag football and does pottery.”
“My hope is I stay here forever,” Bennett says reverently. “My wife has her dream job at U of M,” as a nurse practitioner on the cardiac surgery team. “I have my dream job at Skyline and at the rowing center, and my hope is we can just continue to build this community and have positive impacts.
