With his team hard at work preparing for the weekend competition in West Windsor, N.J., The State News caught up with Weise to discuss the NCAA Rowing Championships, recruiting and sustaining success in a lesser-known sport.

With your team set to compete in the 2012 NCAA Rowing Championships, what are your expectations headed into the weekend?
What I expect is for us to have our best race of the year. You always do it at the National Championships, to be able to do it. I don’t know if we have a shot at winning – I don’t know if we’re that fast. (We just) want a shot to be able to get ourselves into the Grand Finals and that’s really what we’re looking for. If we can get our team to perform at our highest level, we can be really competitive. We’ve been working the past couple weeks – we didn’t have the greatest Big Ten Championships. We were a little bit disappointed there and I think sometimes when you have a chip on your shoulder, it adds a little more motivation to be able to prove yourself and that’s what I’m hoping to do.

So, what actually makes a good rower?

First, a good rower – it’s a racing sport, similar to track or swimming. That’s the closest thing. In swimming, it’s like an 800 run. It’s a very physically demanding sport so we do train more than we race, let’s put it that way. In baseball, they play 50 games, right? But in rowing, we really do like 12 races a year because the training component is so heavy. A good rower typically is someone that’s tall and long. They’ve got long levers but they’ve all got a big set of lungs and are able to go the distance. Racing can last between six and seven minutes so they’ve got to be able to go the distance, that’s the first thing. The second thing – the biggest challenge of our sport is being able to work when you’re really tired. And not only work on your own, but work with others, and that’s really where the biggest challenge lies. In the middle of a race, your rate isn’t quite maxed but it’s pretty darn close. You’ve gotta keep your wits about you and that’s the biggest challenge.

Some sports such as football and men’s basketball make recruiting a very public affair, but rowing isn’t handled quite the same way. How do you go about luring potential recruits to MSU?

Well, there’s a couple of things. One, we’ve been consistent and consistently successful. That always helps in the recruiting class. We’ve got a great body of water. Typically, you think of our football stadium, that’s where they’re competing. For us, it’s a body of water that we train on. It’s one of the best in the Midwest to train on, so people really enjoy that and it helps them become fast. That’s part of the allure. We also recruit heavily on campus. We’ve had three U.S. National team members and all of them walked on. Two were swimmers and one was a basketball player. They were born to be a rower and didn’t know it. You never know what you’re going to find on campus, either. It’s a working sport. It’s a technical sport, as well, you do have to learn some technique but it’s not like basketball, where you gotta spend years and years and years. It becomes more of an effort, training-based sport. People that find they’re able to do that can be successful fairly quickly, not super quick.