Oxford Graduate Montana Butsch Is Putting Together Things You Don’t See Very Often: The Inner City and Rowing.

You don’t generally put inner city and rowing together. Montana Butsch does, though, and his Chicago Training Center is teaching more than proper row technique.

You don’t generally put “inner city” and “rowing” together. The sport of crew rowing, long associated with Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, the Olympics – you know, upper class collegiate and boarding schools – is starting to break that mold in Chicago, though. Former Oxford rower Montana Butsch founded the Chicago Training Center as an outreach for urban kids, and he doesn’t just teach proper row technique: students must maintain a 3.0 GPA, work as a team and leave behind the street life and cross gang boundaries. To that end, occasionally Montana drives kids home after dark, because it’s the right thing to do.

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