Junior Coaches
Sharon BonDurant
Junior and Middle School Coach
Returning to coaching with the junior and masters programs takes me back to my roots when I started coaching in 1984. But before I was a coach I was a rower. I started rowing during high school at Green Lake Crew in Seattle, where my three sisters and I rowed. Towards the end of my collegiate rowing career at the University of Washington one of my former coaches asked me “when are you going to start coaching”, it had not occurred to me before, but this coach was also the coach of many national teams and the head coach of the UW women’s team, so I thought that maybe I should think about it. He allowed me to spend an entire spring in his launch where I learned an enormous amount about rowing and coaching.
I started coaching at Green Lake in Seattle and was lucky enough to have some success there. In 1986 I was invited to try out for the US Lightweight National Team (it used to be a thing…) and while competing at the US Nationals here at Eagle Creek I was approached by the Princeton women’s varsity coach and was offered the assistant coaches job.
Coaching at Princeton was like going to coaching graduate school. Some of the best and most influential coaches in the country were coaching there at the time. Some success at Princeton allowed me to be the head coach for a couple USRowing development camps and an assistant coach at a few national team selection camps. Following a stint at Princeton I moved to New Haven, CT to an assistant coach at Yale.
A change in regime at Yale opened another door when I was offered a job at USRowing to manage the coaching education dept (a department of one) and coordinate moving people and boats around the world as the team manager for the US rowing teams. That was 8 years of lots of travel and regattas, included many World Cups, World Championships, Pan Am games, and Olympic Games.
After too much travel I asked to work solely on coaching education, where I facilitated all of the coaching education programs and produced 14 coaching videos. Working with video morphed into the development of a live streaming service for rowing where myself and a group of friends from the tech world, streamed nearly 140 events from 2010 to 2019, including Youth Nationals, the San Diego Crew Classic, the IRAs, and the U23 World Championships.
The pandemic put an end to USRowing having a video department and now I am semi-retired. My tech buddies and I formed a live streaming company for fun, and I am back to coaching juniors and masters, and puttering in a boathouse, which is wonderful. Rowing for me was a lot of really hard work and a lot of fun, and I hope I can bring that satisfaction of hard work and fun to the people I coach.
I am retiring in 2022 from IU Health after 35 years of Nursing. Much of my career was spent in Risk Management and Patient Safety.
I started assisting with coaching new rowers in the summer of 2021 and that fall I completed my US rowing Level 2 Coaching certification. My first official coaching position was to assist Willie Black with the winter training for the middle school group. It was so much fun. Watching the kids meet new friends, learn how to row, and have fun while doing it is an opportunity, I’m thankful to be a part of.
I began rowing during an exchange year (‘98/‘99) while in college. Staffordshire University in Stoke upon Trent, UK, had a policy that in lieu of classes on Wednesday afternoons, all students were to participate in a club sport. I decided to try something that my stateside school didn’t offer...rowing.
Our team was very small. We could field a women’s 4+ and a men’s 8+. We rowed on a beautiful lake called Rudyard lake, named after Rudyard Kipling. We only had two boats and our boat house was so small that we had to de rig the boats after each practice in order to put them away. We were coached by a fellow student and teammate and transported our boats to races on the top of rented vans! It was fantastic.
Upon return to the University of South Dakota, I decided to start my own rowing club. It was very small. We held fundraisers and bought a couple of ergs, along with a really old and heavy 8+ that was stored outside in a nice lady’s backyard. I coached from the coxswains seat and that was my first coaching experience.
My husband and I moved to Indy for graduate school. I had some time on my hands, spent most of it at IRC. I started coaching the junior novice girls and loved it. I have since coached both junior and learn to row classes and rowed with the masters. I even briefly served as the interim executive director.
I took an extended break from rowing during which time I had three children. I am excited to come back to IRC and once again work with kids in a capacity where I hope to instill the same love and dedication to sport and wellness that I have.
Julia Burroughs
Junior and Middle School Coach
Jayna Dolfi
Junior Coach
I began rowing at IRC in 2012 as an 8th grader. Before I started rowing, I was a swimmer, and when my dad asked me to try rowing, I told him “absolutely not, I’m never quitting swimming”. He made me try it anyways and I immediately quit swimming to start rowing and never looked back. I rowed all of high school at IRC, and when I was injured my senior year, I got my first taste of coaching by helping out with the novice girls instead of rowing. That summer I coached the novice summer camps and learned I loved teaching novices how to row. In the fall I went to Purdue and rowed my freshman year with Purdue Crew, but after being plagued with injury and burnout I decided it was time to take a break from rowing.
In the summer of 2020, I came back to IRC to help coach the junior summer program. All the kids were rowing in singles in order to social distance, and most had never sculled before, let alone row in a single. Teaching novice scullers how to row singles was chaotic, but I had a lot of fun and learned a lot about how to teach the basics of rowing.
In 2022, after graduating college and moving to Colorado for a year, I moved back to Indianapolis and found myself back at IRC 10 years after I first started rowing. In the summer I coached the early morning junior practice and specialized in coming up with all sorts of interesting “Fun Friday” practices. In the fall, I was supposed to help coach the varsity men, but after ending up with the novice men instead a few times I decided to adopt them and became the dedicated novice men’s coach.
I have a lot of love for this sport, and as I continue coaching novices, I hope to instill that love and excitement for rowing in all my rowers!
I first started rowing in my sophomore year of high school for a small club in The Woodlands, Texas. I was recruited to Indiana University where I rowed for four years placing 3rd in Big 10’s in 2019 and 11th at NCAAs in the second varsity eight. In my free time, I love to be outdoors, you can often find me hiking around Eagle Creek with my doggo Berkley! Outside of rowing, I work at Target as an Operations Manager. I absolutely love coaching and am so excited to share my rowing and collegiate recruiting knowledge with IRC athletes!