By Edwin Sam ’13, Sports Editor
Senior Lilly Fleischmann ’11 (pictured, right with teamate Jo Jeelani ’12 and Coach Pedro Palacios) has epitomized the term student-athlete over the course of her career at Cincinnati Country Day School. She has shown hard work, dedication, and determination to excel in the classroom and on the water, and has thus been accepted to Dartmouth College where she will compete on the school’s varsity rowing team.
In addition to having achieved a bevy of rowing success, Fleischmann is a Cum Laude Society inductee, National Merit Finalist, and US Rowing Scholastic Honor Roll Recipient. Fleischmann has thus successfully balanced sports and academics throughout her CCDS career due to her extraordinary effort.
She said that especially during junior year, it was “hard but not impossible” to row at a championship level and succeed in AP courses. Fleischmann credits her great organizational skills from to her mom, Julie Fleischmann, CCDS President of the Board of Trustees. “I have a schedule that works and helps me stay on top of things. I get it from my mom,” Fleischmann said.
Fleischmann chose the Ivy League because she wanted to be both a Division I athlete and serious student in college. “At some schools, you either devote all your time to a sport or you are a student,” Fleischmann said. “All the places that I looked at held their athletes to a pretty high academic standard.”
Having stellar grades was a good way to keep coaches interested in her. Of the schools she looked at, Dartmouth stood out because they were looking for “positive leaders who were team players and wanted to work hard to advance everybody forward.” Though the female rowers at Dartmouth are competitive for seats, they still work together to improve as a team. Fleischmann added that the beautiful campus and understanding coaches also attracted her to Dartmouth. While she is not expecting
the transition from high school to college rowing to be easy, she is optimistic, because others have done it before her.
Rowing is considered by some as a sport with no off-season, where the only way to stay in shape is to practice year-round. Cincinnati rowers are
at a small disadvantage because the lakes are frozen during the winter, so they can’t get onto the water. To make up for this, Fleischmann works hard in the gym doing cardio, weightlifting, and using the ergometer rowing machine. Her schedule only gets more rigorous as she enters the spring when there are weekend regattas. “We usually have four or five practices during the week because of regattas on the weekend,” Fleischmann said “I keep up with about three or four extra sessions in the gym.”
During the spring, Fleischmann is forced to decrease the amount of social activities that she does in order to keep her grades up. A lot of her study time is taken away because of weekend regattas. She is hoping that this year her hard work will pay off like it did last season, when she and current junior Jo Jeelani won the petite final at Youth Nationals. “I would love to do really well regionally again and hopefully have a chance to row at Scholastic and Youth Nationals,” Fleischmann said. “Our success has come from the fact that we have rowed together since the summer after my sophomore year.”
As she pursues similar results in her last high school season, Fleischmann, a role model for any young student-athlete, continues the tradition of CCDS’s dominance in rowing.
Photo courtesy of Lilly Fleischmann ’11
