Our Story

But the version of the sport I fell in love with was not found in a gym or on a local regatta. It was found in Croatia; a country I had spent my whole life visiting, and one that would ultimately shape the athlete, the coach, and the person I became.

As a high school rower desperate to stand out to college recruiters, I traveled back for a summer to train with HAVK Mladost. My father's connections in Croatian athletics led me to Nikola Bralic, a Hall of Fame coach who took my development seriously in a way I had never experienced before. Through Nikola, I found myself in the orbit of his protégés, Martin and Valent Sinković. Two brothers who moved through the water with a quiet ferocity I had never seen in athletes. Not performing. Not trying. Just being exactly what they were built to be.

What I didn't know was that they were already among the most accomplished rowers on earth. Watching them row on the glassy surface of Jarun at dawn, I understood for the first time what this sport could actually be at its highest level. What I didn't understand then, I understand now: the Sinkovićs aren't great because of what they do on the water. They're great because of what the water did to them.

The Training that summer elevated my skills on and off the water, pushing me leagues above my peers and ultimately allowing me to row as a Division 1 athlete at The University of Oklahoma. Now as a masters coach, I look back at that summer not as just a training memory, but as a feeling. The Adriatic the color of deep cobalt glass, so clear you can see the seabed twenty feet below your hull. The way a konoba dinner stretches for three hours because nobody wants it to end. Stone towns that have been watching boats leave and return for thousands of years. This was how the sport of rowing was meant to be enjoyed.

Years later, when I approached Martin and Valent with the idea for RowCroatia, the conversation I expected was a business conversation. It wasn't. They talked about how rowing had never been separate from the country for them. Growing up on the water at Jarun, strolling down the walls of Split, traveling through the islands off Hvar, experiencing the stillness of Lim Bay at dawn, admiring Dubrovnik's walls rising straight from the Adriatic, and rowing deep into the Neretva Delta had shaped not just their technique but their sense of who they were.

RowCroatia exists because the culture, the water, and the people of Croatia do something to this sport that no training plan or coaching manual can replicate. If you have ever felt that rowing deserves to be experienced somewhere bigger than a boathouse and a finish line, this is where you come.