Among the memories Grace Latz has of her first days at the United States women's Princeton Training Center are the posters of the past Olympic teams that hang on the wall in the erg room, the red, white and blue team blades in the boat bays, and the women who were competing for places on the senior team that surrounded her.
"I remember being a U23 selection camp athlete in 2010," Latz said. "I didn't know how the system worked or what U23s even were six months before I was in the camp. I remember seeing the blades and finding that really special, and seeing the athletes that would then go on to the 2012 Olympics and finding that really inspiring.
"I didn't make the team out of that camp, but it was really cool and exciting to see what they go through," she said. "You could tell how focused they were and how well they were rowing. I held in my mind the posters in the erg room when I would go and train by myself."
Last month, Latz was named to the 2017 women's team that will compete in the World Rowing Championships in Sarasota, Florida, beginning next week. This will be Latz's fourth senior team. She made her first in 2014 and won a bronze medal in the quad. She rowed in the four in 2015 and returned to the quad for the 2016 Olympics.
This year she will row in the eight.
During her years of being part of the training center group, Latz had plenty of time to look at the posters on the walls. But what she knows now about the athletes pictured are that they were only a part of a system that has been integrating new, young athletes into the training center every year, and that the ones who eventually made those teams are only a fraction of number of faces that worked toward those victories.
It is something veteran training center women have always noted. Just after winning her second gold medal in the women's eight in Rio, now-retired Olympian Meghan Musnicki pointed to the women who came before her, the ones who made the 2016 team and the ones that did not.
"The definition of us this whole quad is pulling together as a unit, all 30-plus of us that went through the four years of training, and that's an amazing feeling," Musnicki said during the Rio press conference following the eight's third consecutive Olympic championship. "It's an honor to be part of such an amazing group of women, and I feel like every single one of them is rooting for you and has your back. It's very special."
Latz made a similar point about having watched the young women who were in this year's group, the ones who were selected onto the 2017 crews - the eight, the four, the quad and the pair - and those that did not.
"It is funny when talking about the new girls now," Latz said. "They can see the people who are on those posters, but there are so many athletes that didn't make those posters. There are so many athletes who came through who are not on the walls, that's something they don't see right now, but it is something they will come to appreciate.
"It's interesting that a lot of the people who are new to the team don't have many years between them and graduating college," she said. "And it's really funny to think that some of them first started rowing when I started rowing here at the training center.
"It's refreshing feeding of off the positivity of the new athletes and seeing them encountering all these things for the first time," Latz said. "It kind of has me revisiting what I thought of that time for me. Now I it's my turn to come forward and bring what the veterans that came before I did brought for me."
And so, this Sunday, the women who are representing the US training center group will begin competition and launch the four-year cycle that will build towards the 2020 Olympics.
Of the 19 women that are now in Sarasota preparing, eight of them will be rowing on their first senior national team, seven are returning Olympians, and one, Megan Kalmoe who is rowing the pair with Tracy Eisser, is a three-time Olympian rowing on her ninth senior team.
Overall, it is a young squad, but not so young that it stands out as the youngest in head coach Tom Terhaar's memories of the three groups that started the last three Olympic cycles.
"The youngest? I don't know," Terhaar said when asked during a recent interview. "It seems that way, but I don't know if it is the youngest, or the youngest in a while."
That Terhaar couldn't answer the "youngest" question off the top of his head when pressed, seems more a reflection of where the focus is right now and the fact that, as Latz pointed out, the number of women that come through the training center during any Olympic cycle vastly outnumber those that made a team each year, and that the 2017 squad is really the beginning of the foundation of the 2020 team.
The age and experience of every new team doesn't make Terhaar's job any easier or more difficult, he said. "I don't think it's easier, and I don't think it's more difficult. It's the same. We're trying to go as fast as we can go and get the most we can out of what we are doing."
Every year of each cycle has a distinct feel, Terhaar said. The first has the least amount of pressure to perform, is a chance to expose new athletes to international competition. The last year has the most pressure. "During the Olympic year, there is always more pressure to perform; it's the most important year," he said.
"Right now, we're literally just forming a team, we didn't get everyone here basically until July. So we're just forming the team and giving them an opportunity to race and see how it goes. I don't think being a young team makes it any easier or harder, really. It's what it is, and we will see what happens when we get to Worlds."
For Latz and the other more veteran members of the team, their roles extend to more than competition in their individual crews. As the women who came before them did, Latz sees herself and the other veterans as being a resource to the new athletes.
And the new athletes welcome it.
"I definitely talk to them about what it has been like in the past, and I ask them questions about it," said Sarah Dougherty, one of the eight first year senior team women. "When selection came around, I asked them what it was like in the different years.
"They have a very calm mindset," she said. "Being someone that is a lot younger than them, I feel like can relax a little bit and if I ask them a question the first thing they will say is, don't worry about that.
"They are very, very chill about rowing in general, and the one thing I have learned this year from the older women is to not over think anything. Just let things be; don't over think it and just take it one stroke at a time. And that is something that we will bring into the world championships."
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