It was basically an audition without anyone knowing.

Freshman orientation at Princeton provides an opportunity for the incoming class of wide-eyed, soon-to-be-knee-deep-in-books teenagers to make friends, learn about the school and become more comfortable with their surroundings.

It’s also where the NCAA Championship-caliber rowing team does some of its best recruiting.

“They basically pick out anyone they see that is tall and they think looks kind of athletic,” Princeton senior Kanoe Shizuru said.

Shizuru was one of those students four years ago. A graduate of Kamehameha, where she played volleyball year-round, Shizuru decided to give up the sport in college.

“I thought about (playing),” Shizuru said. “But in the end I was done with it and didn’t really want to do it.”

An initiation to rowing

At 5-foot-10, Shizuru might stand out in a place like Hawaii, but she didn’t expect to get hit up by the rowing coaches at Princeton, where the athletes are much taller.

She was one of the few picked out that day at freshman orientation and didn’t turn down the invite to practice rowing despite having no experience with it.

“My parents (rowed), but for whatever reason it wasn’t something I had ever gotten into it,” Shizuru said. “I wasn’t planning on playing a sport, but I wanted to do something athletic, so I went down to the boat house and they just kind of started teaching me how to row.”

Shizuru admitted practice wasn’t incredibly fun and many of the invites that show interest end up quitting after going through the eight or nine practices a week the Tigers sometimes have.

During the winter, it’s strictly work on the rowing machine, repeating the motions over and over and over.

The reward doesn’t come until the spring, when the sun finally starts to shine and it warms up just enough to get out and race.

For two years, Shizuru competed on the lesser boats. Everyone that tries out and sticks with it gets to race in various meets, but the higher-level boats are the ones everyone aspires to be in.

When it looked like Shizuru may never get there, quitting started to become a regular thought.

“It certainly did,” Shizuru said. “I think the first year is not too bad because you still don’t really know what you’re doing. My sophomore year was definitely pretty hard because I still was not quite where I wanted to be and that was pretty hard.”

Finding a rowing mentor

Her determination to that point led her to join the Honolulu Rowing Club during the summer when she was home visiting. She met president Ralph Earle, who taught her how to scull and became a big part of her rowing success.

Without Earle, who died two weeks ago, just before her final home race, Shizuru might have followed through on that thought about quitting.

“He helped me to stay on track over the summer when I was training alone,” Shizuru said. “I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today without a lot of people who believed in me and supported me, and he was someone who contributed to my rowing success by always encouraging me to keep rowing.”

Her work with Earle helped improve her times and the Princeton coaching staff started to notice. There was one practice in particular during the winter of her junior year when a coach was riding her pretty hard while on the rowing machine to speed it up.

She remembers it as a gut-check moment, to really find out if all of the work going into the sport was really worth it.

“I looked around at the other athletes and thought there’s no reason I can’t be doing what all of these other girls are doing,” Shizuru said. “They have been doing it so much longer and have that advantage over me, but I told myself I needed to be at the level that everyone else was at if I was going to keep going.”

Earning a top spot

She won a spot on the varsity 4 boat for the postseason and helped win a silver medal at the Ivy League Championships. They qualified for the NCAA Championships in California and placed second in the petite final.

“That was so crazy and I think it was the funnest race I have ever had,” Shizuru said. “Especially because we are in the Ivy League, people don’t think of it as an athletic conference, but when we go to the NCAAs and we’re going up against the Ohio State and the Cals and the Michigans of the world, it’s pretty cool. Especially because I don’t really think I was ever very athletic in high school and now I’m doing this.”

Shizuru is again part of the V4A team this year that finished the regular season with a win over No. 15 Iowa two weeks ago on Lake Carnegie.

The next competition is the Ivy League Championships this Sunday on Cooper River in Pennsauken, N.J.

Shizuru is now a critical part of the top four-person boat on the team, which is quite the accomplishment for a walk-on picked out of a massive group of freshmen at an event four years ago that had nothing to do with rowing.

“It’s crazy how it’s all worked out. (Rowing) has definitely been a huge part of my time at Princeton,” Shizuru said. “I think rowing has really helped my confidence as a person. Princeton can be an intimidating kind of place, especially in an academic sense, so I feel like I’ve been able to handle rowing and school and all of those things and it’s something that is very rewarding knowing I have been able to do it.”