Amy Ludovici was walking across the Syracuse Quad when she heard someone quickly jogging up from behind her. Andrea Buch tapped Ludovici on the shoulder and handed her a flier.

“’Hey, you look like a great athlete,’” Ludovici recalls Buch, then a Syracuse assistant rowing coach, telling her. “’You should come to this.’”

On the Quad next to them was a boat. The same type the SU rowing team practices with and races in. Around it were about 10 athletes and assistant coaches all watching and tracking down women they thought looked athletic.

The purpose was to find the next crop of Syracuse rowing walk-ons.

“Leaving competitive sports, I needed, I missed that involvement in something, or being with other people with a similar mindset,” Ludovici said. “It didn’t take much convincing at all.”

Ludovici — a basketball player in high school — soon became one of about 60 women to be invited to try out for SU’s rowing team. Many had no background in the sport. Some had what it took to make the roster. Others did not.

Now a senior, Ludovici said she’s the only remaining walk-on member of her 2011 class to be on the team. That’s because the team has consistently grown more competitive, with athletes who had the ability in previous years harshly being cut for younger, better candidates. Still, many of the athletes don’t come in with a background in the sport.

Now, two regattas into its spring season — the latest one being Sunday in Clemson, South Carolina — the fall tryout cycle will once again get to show its benefits on the water.

“We’re looking for women who are unafraid to go,” head coach Justin Moore said. “Women who like to train and women who really want to be part of an environment where the team is bigger than them, their crew is bigger than them. Not somebody who wants to be the star.”

It’s a roster of 56 with only 20 scholarships to earn. Moore recruits athletes he thinks fit the mold, but many must come just from trying people out. The 60 quickly whittles down to 30, Moore says, noting that half of them “self-select” while the rest continue the tryout process that lasts for more than a month, and a crop of walk-ons forms.

And those 20 scholarships — the most allowed in Division I rowing — become a source of competition to earn. Ludovici walked on when she was a freshman. But as a senior, she’s getting a full ride — as has everyone else in the first varsity eight boat. Moore said he likes to at least give partial scholarships, but make that top boat a reason for competition for everyone else.

“Rowing is a late onset sport. Whereas like swimming and gymnastics are really early onset sports,” Moore said. “Fifty percent of our women were pretty good athletes in other sports and rowing was just the path that they chose because I think it provided the most opportunity.”

But those opportunities are now becoming fewer and farther between. Ludovici said more and more the coaches have had to cut athletes that have already been on the roster.

“The coaches kind of had to step in and say, ‘These are hard and fast standards and no matter what, if you can’t make them, we’re sorry we can’t have you back,’” Ludovici said. “There have been more substantial cuts as the years have gone on.

“Some people do everything they can to try and make this team, and it’s just not enough.”

One was Ludovici’s sister, Mary Ludovici, who didn’t have the same 5-foot-11 frame. Ludovici said her sister was upset to not make the roster, but instead became a captain on the dance team.

It’s a ruthless yet extremely calculated effort to find the best athletes. Assistant coach Jim Lister has been yelled at for trying to take all the best Australian athletes when he’s recruiting Down Under.

He spent 17 days there in February, reaching out to rowers he’d heard of and keeping his eye out for more.

“They’ve been coming up to us and saying ‘Hey, there’s a girl that I rowed with that just made the junior national team,’” Lister said. “So we’re getting some of that. And the other part is we’re going down to the boathouses and jumping in the launch with the coaches and establishing a relationship.”

But for the Orange’s 11 international rowers, or ones plucked straight off the Quad, the expectation is the same. Moore says his sport, like anything, is a craft. He speaks in inspirational clichés. And he trusts in the Malcolm Gladwell belief that you can become great at anything if you devote 10,000 hours to it.

He knows that the Saturday morning regatta doesn’t draw the crowd of the Friday night football game in the Carrier Dome. He knows it takes a special type of person to set their alarm to a time that starts with 4 a.m.

And Moore is on a perpetual, never-ending search to find that type of person, wherever they may come from and in whatever form.

“Unlike football, unlike basketball, unlike sports with defense, our sport is just physical,” Moore said. “Nobody is trying to prevent us from trying to achieve our goal. It is just how hard can you go. How well trained are you, how physically prepared are you? How technically proficient? And how much are you willing to hurt?

“If you can get somebody to engage incredibly deeply for a long period of time, they’re going to become excellent at it.”

Published on April 19, 2015 at 11:01 pm

Contact Sam: sblum@syr.edu | @SamBlum3