After a fairly distinguished run in the sport of curling, having qualified for three national championships and competing in the 2019 Youth Olympic Trials, Sam Willertz, a senior at Herbert Henry Dow High School in Midland MI, decided he "needed a sport to tide me over between the curling seasons," found his way to the boathouse of Bay City Rowing Club, and started rowing.

Like most of us since the onset of the pandemic, Willertz started spending a lot of time in the single. Meanwhile back at school in his Engineering Design and Development class, Willertz and his senior classmates Caleb Allington and Tom Wood were tasked with coming up with a solution to a "problem that we have experienced in our daily lives."

Back out on the water, Willertz noticed that navigation problems plagued many of the scullers.

"I have been rowing with the masters and senior rowers at my club for the last few months as it worked into my schedule better than our high school practices," Willertz said. "Since we all have to row in singles, some of the less experienced scullers and some of the older, experienced rowers had trouble every once in a while turning and looking behind them to see river debris and other obstructions."

Willertz had found his problem.

As a first step, the group is asking for participation in an eight-question online questionnaire to determine how most folks deal with visibility challenges, frequency of checking ahead, what outcomes they have seen (flipping, damage, etc.), and interest in possible solutions.

"We are currently working to gather information about whether or not other rowers (predominantly older ones) have trouble finding logs and other obstructions when they are rowing," Willertz said.

The eight-question survey can be found here: Rowing Visibility Survey.

Willertz in the 1x

"The survey is where we are gathering the quantitative data to help us justify and validate that the problem that we have found is a problem that affects other rowers, not just my club," Willertz said. "We are supposed to gather some data from scholarly articles on the Internet, but since we have established such a niche problem, we have to gather all of the data by ourselves and share it with as many people as possible to get the best quality data we can. I have reached out to every possible rowing contact that I could think of and asked them all to share our survey, including the World Rowing Federation and US Rowing, who both offered to share it on their social media."

Subsequently the team will be looking for 'mentor rowers' to consult with when they start designing a possible solution to the problem, "mostly to answer questions and things like that, as well as provide feedback about their personal experiences with our problem," Willertz said. Interested possible mentors can write row2k and we will forward to the team.

Tom Wood, Caleb Allington, and Sam Willertz in front of Herbert Henry Dow High School

If you are participating in a rowing-centric school project, STEM or not, let us know and we may be able to share your story.