Portsmouth Native Fighting to Make Olympic Team

Deaglan McEachern said it takes 10,000 hours before someone can get really good at something, and he has spent at least that much time rowing since he first took up the sport as a sophomore at Phillips Exeter Academy in 2000.

Twelve years later, the 28-year-old Portsmouth native hopes to qualify for the men's pair event at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, and it will all come down to how well he and his teammate on the U.S. National Rowing Team perform in the qualifying race on June 12 in Princeton, N.J., where the U.S. National Rowing Team trains.

McEachern is confident he can achieve a time of 6:24 or less in the 2,000-meter rowing event. There will be as many as 12 two-man teams from across the country who always want to compete in London in July.

"If we win this race, it's going to be by less than a second or so. It's going to be really tight," said McEachern, who is currently training in the San Francisco Bay area where he lives and works. "I feel confident that if we execute the race we're capable of, we'll win."

He also believes this is the best chance he has had to make it to the summer Olympic games, and he hopes to capitalize on it.

According to his bio on the U.S. National Rowing Team's web site, McEachern has already demonstrated his athletic prowess.

He won the 2010 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race and finished 9th in the quadruple sculls at the 2007 World Rowing Championships. McEachern also won a Bronze medal in the double sculls and quadruple sculls at the 2007 Pan American Games.

At the national level, McEachern has also won the pair at the 2010 World Rowing Championship Trials. He won a Gold medal in the double sculls and quadruple sculls at the 2007 U.S. Rowing National Championships and won the double sculls at the 2007 Pan American Games Trials.

When he attended Phillips Exeter Academy, McEachern said he had his sights set on playing basketball and baseball. When he injured his achilles tendon and couldn't play baseball in the spring of 2000, he tried out for the school's rowing team and found that he was pretty good at it. From that point on, he devoted himself to rowing either for PEA or the Durham Boat Club on the Squamscott River and other parts of Great Bay.

The Seacoast has always sported some strong rowing programs and they helped McEachern develop his work ethic and technique that allowed him to excell at the sport, which he compares to golf where a rower has to focus on making themselves better outside of the context a regular team.

McEachern said athletes who hope to compete on the Olympic stage have to make any sacrifices and be dedicated to strict training regimens. In his case, he typically rows four to five hours a day and spends several hours eating to replace all of the calories he burns off.

Although McEachern has lived on the West Coast since graduating from college, he still sees Portsmouth as his hometown and misses the many friends and family members he still has here. If he qualifies for the U.S. Men's Olympic Rowing team in June, McEachern said he plans to wear his Daniel Street Tavern T-shirt at the Olympic Games with the hope that his photo would get published on the Summer Olympic Games wall.

While winning an Olympic medal in his chosen sport would be a great moment for McEachern, he said just getting to compete in the Olympics would also be a major achievement.

"If I could get to the Olympics that would be the greatest thing I would have accomplished in rowing," he said.