Philadelphia City Rowing is inspiring public school students to take up a new sport

Daydreams as she noticed boats floating atop the Schuylkill River are what first piqued Jayla Stone’s interest. It was what lurked beneath the surface, however, that caused Nasya Fountain pause. Jorja Bunyon-Nelson just needed something to do.

No matter what brought them together, the trio of high school students hopes sharing their experience with Philadelphia City Rowing will inspire other students of color to explore spaces where their faces aren’t often seen.

“We can thrive in any community we’re put in,” Bunyon-Nelson said. “We just have to believe we belong there in the first place.”

At 6-foot-5, George Rowley doesn’t necessarily fold into sculls easily. His size 15 shoes don’t help. Still, the 33-year-old Philadelphia native believes in the benefits of rowing and works to put as many students into boats as possible.

Since 2018, Rowley has managed community outreach for PCR, which was founded in 2009 as a privately funded nonprofit. He graduated from Franklin Learning Center in 2007 but wasn’t introduced to rowing until he returned home from Morgan State University and became a camp counselor with another local rowing organization.

PCR provides free, year-round programming to middle and high school students in the Philadelphia School District, including charter schools.

Currently, Rowley says, PCR has about 54 students across various high schools. It also has about 30 middle school students. In the fall, the focus is on skill development. In the spring, PCR competes against other area high schools.

It also provides academic support, nutrition education, and mentoring with a goal to “empower Philadelphia public school students to reach their highest potential.”

“That really is the heart and soul of what PCR does,” Rowley says. “We’re not necessarily here to create Olympic-level rowers. We’re helping empower some individuals who may have issues with anxiety, social anxiety, depression, and then watch them become more comfortable speaking out, leading, and then instructing others through the sport of rowing.”

Stone can attest.

The junior at Parkway Center City Middle College often wondered about the boats she saw on the Schuylkill as her dad drove her to school from their home in Germantown.

But Stone, now 16, knew nothing about rowing when she joined PCR last year.

She had been looking for a new sport since the pandemic had scuttled several seasons that once occupied her time. The inactivity led to physical changes with which she struggled.

“I gained a lot of weight like a lot of people, and I wasn’t really doing well with it,” she said.

Progress didn’t come quickly. It took weeks of conditioning, hours perfecting techniques, watching instructional YouTube videos at home, and ice packs. Plenty of ice packs.

“I’d come home and put ice all over my body,” she said, laughing. “It was so tiring. I thought, ‘I won’t be able to do this all year.’”

Encouragement from her new coaches and teammates helped. It also helped, Stone said, that her grandmother, Agnes Veney, 56, brags to everyone she knows.

“That’s another reason I keep pushing,” she said. “She’s so proud of me because not a lot of Black people do this.”

Making new friends, overcoming fears, and feeling more confident also kept Stone coming back for more.

“I have really bad social anxiety, and I just learned to be myself,” she said. “I learned to speak up for myself. I just really stopped caring what people thought about me because I have this group of people who like me for me.”

When she first joined PCR in sixth grade, Fountain wasn’t anxious about meeting new people. It was the water that made her squirm.

“Being submerged in the Schuylkill River isn’t really anyone’s ideal day,” said Fountain, now a sophomore at Science Leadership Academy.

It didn’t help, she says, that her mother, Anaris, forced her to attend PCR so she would get some exercise.

Fountain, now 15, says she socialized when she first attended, but begged her mom every day to let her stay home. More often than not, the request was denied.

Sometimes, though, she wore her mother down, often staying home in the last weeks of each season. But her mom always made her return the next year.

“I was a kid, and when you’re forced into something, you kind of just don’t like it,” she said.

Fountain’s attitude shifted last year when she met her best friend, Adriana Buvac, a junior at Masterman, who was one of PCR’s top rowers last season.

It also didn’t hurt that the physical work Fountain put into the program paid dividends.

“I was on the chubbier side back then,” she said. “I was more of a lazy person. I didn’t really want to do sports. But then I started to gain more muscle and lose more weight.”

Her experience at PCR, she says, also made her think about college for the first time. She would be the first person in her immediate family to attend.

When asked what she would say to her mom now about PCR, Fountain chuckled.

“I would thank her for finding this,” she said. “I would tell her that this is probably one of the best decisions that I have ever made.”

Fountain did eventually take an unplanned dip in the Schuylkill last summer while in a boat with Bunyon-Nelson. It flipped seconds after they launched, dumping both in the water.

It wasn’t nearly as terrifying as she once feared, Fountain said. For Bunyon-Nelson, now a senior at Central High School, it did reinforce an important lesson about teamwork.

“That’s kind of what PCR is,” the 17-year-old said, “working together and making things happen.”

“You can talk about teamwork,” she added later, “but when you actually have to put in the effort to work together as a team, you can actually learn from it and then start to understand how to use teamwork in everyday life.”

Bunyon-Nelson jokes that being trapped on a boat for hours at a time with her teammates has forced her to be more social, something she admits makes her uncomfortable.

Sometimes, Fountain said, teams from other schools have caused the discomfort.

“With Philadelphia City Rowing,” Fountain said, “we go up against more private schools, so we automatically have a [stigma] because we’re a bunch of public school kids rowing. Some other teams might say things, but I think we just stay humble and don’t entertain what others say.”

Bunyon-Nelson, now in her second season with the program, blocks out the noise and focuses on challenging herself. The 2,000-meter race, which she calls “everyone’s worst nightmare,” has been her nemesis, but she has worked hard to finish faster. She also has forced herself to be more social in the hopes that younger generations might follow her path.

“I always believe representation is important,” she said, “so if me rowing encourages another Black boy or girl to row, that’s important to me. When you see someone like you doing something, it makes you more inclined to think you can do it. So if I can encourage more people who look like me to join the sport, that would mean everything to me.”