Audrey Gray was tired of running. The girls track team didn’t feel like a real team. Training for 5K races was no longer fun. A family friend mentioned that she was on the scholastic rowing team at St. Joseph Academy in Cleveland. The team trained out of the Foundry Community Rowing and Sailing Center, a 65,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility on the East Bank of the Flats.
Gray, now a 16-year-old junior at Bay High School in Bay Village, attended a Foundry learn-to-row camp in the summer of 2016. The first time she climbed into an eight-person rowing shell, she was afraid it would flip and throw her into the Cuyahoga River. But she enjoyed the experience so much that she joined the Foundry’s approximately 40-member community team, the Cleveland Foundry Junior Team, that fall.
Gray is among the approximately 7,000 youths who have taken advantage of rowing and sailing since the Foundry opened in September 2017. The nonprofit offers programs throughout the year for those in grades 6 to 12 who know how to swim. Its community teams offer that same demographic the chance to participate in the sports’ competitive spring and fall seasons, an advantage never before available.
More importantly, it offers financial assistance to those whose families can’t afford to pay for them to participate.
Mike Trebilcock, the founder and chairman of technology consulting company MCPc Inc., who started the Foundry with his wife Gina, notes that unlike most boathouses and yacht clubs, this facility caters to minors, not adults.
Inspiration for the Foundry came from the Trebilcocks’ three children, all of whom participated on a Cleveland Rowing Foundation youth team that trained out of the organization’s Flats boathouse. The couple saw firsthand the benefits youngsters derived from participating in the sport: physical fitness, discipline, confidence, a sense of belonging with a circle of like-minded friends that extended far beyond a single neighborhood or school.
“There’s nothing embarrassing happening,” Mike says. “The boat goes fast as a group, or it goes slow as a group.”
Mike and Gina recall that the Cleveland Rowing Foundation simply couldn’t accommodate all the middle- and high-schoolers who wanted to participate in the parent-run youth program. So Mike hired real-estate advisers to find a location on the Cuyahoga River that could. After an unsuccessful year-and-a-half, he saw a for-sale ad for a 2.7-acre multibuilding complex on Columbus Road. One late-19th-century structure had served as a foundry; the others had housed various enterprises. By the time the Trebilcocks purchased the property in late 2015, it had been vacant or simply used for storage for over two decades.
Mike estimates $15 million was spent on acquiring and renovating the complex. A warehouse was converted into a “tank house” featuring 36 rowing stations on two tanks filled with a combined 55,000 gallons of water moved by four 40-horsepower motors to replicate current speeds. He describes it as the only one of its size and caliber in the nation aside from that at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
“When you’re in the tanks, you’re not only learning how to row in an environment where you’re not going to fall or get wet,” he says of the investment. “On top of that, you’re learning correctly.”
The foundry crane bay and another building referred to as “the big house” were finished as shell storage and workout areas equipped with a combined 100 ergometers, or land-rowing machines. An additional $1 million was spent on shells, safety launches and a 520-foot-long rowing dock — the longest in the country, according to director of corporate and community partnerships Michael Ferry.
Programs ranging from summer learn-to-row camps to winter indoor training sessions were developed. Mike estimates approximately 20 part-timers and volunteers assist eight full-time coaches certified by the U.S. Rowing Association or U.S. Sailing Association, all of whom have completed additional Foundry training.
Although the bulk of the 65,000 square feet is utilized by the Foundry, some is used to generate revenue. Laurel School, Magnificat, St. Edward and St. Joseph Academy pay to store their scholastic teams’ shells in the facility and use the dock, tanks and other equipment. Conference rooms, along with other spaces, such as the courtyard and carriage house, can be rented for meetings and events. Memberships to an adult fitness center are sold for $70 a month.
“One [annual] fitness membership pays for one kid for a year,” Mike says.
Gina says students from 63 schools participate in Foundry rowing and sailing programs — a number staffers are looking to increase, particularly in the inner city. Efforts include “Boats and Pools,” a program that involves taking a small shell or sailboat to city of Cleveland pools in the summer; visiting school health and wellness fairs; and taking children out in keelboats for an introductory sailing experience.
“It’s a great community facility that I think can really help to propel youth rowing and sailing at a level that Cleveland has not seen,” Gina says.
Peter Anagnostos, the Foundry’s executive director, says students from the Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School are learning to row and sail as part of the school’s curriculum. And 10 of the students enrolled in CMSD’s online School of One High School use the Foundry’s student lounge as their location every weekday morning of the school year.
In April, they were slated to begin paid internships at MCPc in the afternoons, then return to the Foundry to row with the community team. Anagnostos notes that the Foundry could accommodate two groups of up to 15 School of One students in its student lounge, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
“If [we] start impacting 30 students a year in graduating [from high school] and being inspired to go to college or having a background in technology, we’ve moved the needle a lot,” he says.
In summer 2016, the Foundry spent $1 million installing underwater infrastructure to support transient docks in the lagoon of the historic U.S. Coast Guard Station on Whiskey Island and purchasing a fleet of 30 dinghies. In 2017, it launched a sailing program with the Cleveland Metroparks that will put 80 to 90 youths on the club race team this summer.
The Trebilcocks envision the facilities drawing visitors, even new businesses and their employees, to the city — the Coast Guard Station already has been the site of the 2017 Midwest Collegiate Sailing Association Championships and 2018 U.S. Team Racing Championship for the George H. Hinman Trophy. The center’s goal is to become an integral part of Cleveland, one that puts 10,000 children on the water every year.
