He is swinging the truck and trailer through the narrow streets of Newburgh, N.Y., with remarkable aplomb, relying on occasional instructions shouted from the students in the back to negotiate particularly tricky moments.
Pulling a trailer loaded with a crowd of rowing shells through city streets is not for the faint of heart; a couple of the boats, four seaters, are more than 40 feet long. But Father Mark Connell has been navigating this trailer around Newburgh for years, and he betrays no fear, cheerily carrying on a commentary about the history of rowing at the San Miguel Academy while cutting corners across this Hudson River town a 60-mile drive north of Manhattan.
Boat delivery “is the one thing that I can do that nobody else can. It’s the one thing that really makes me valuable,” he says with a laugh, eyes fixed on the road ahead.
That is, of course, just not true. There are probably other San Miguel parents or teachers—people with nerves of steel—capable of hauling the academy’s boats to rivers and regattas across the Northeast, but what Father Connell has created and sustained in Newburgh is something few others might have been able to.
Father Connell is the director of the San Miguel Program, which runs San Miguel Academy, a Catholic middle school in Newburgh. He is also the head coach of the school’s rowing team. Father Connell conceived of the school while looking to create a positive space in a Rust Belt city struggling to escape a mob of negatives—poverty, crime and gun violence among them.
The San Miguel Program represents a year-round effort to keep S.M.A. students engaged in learning with afterschool, summer and other enrichment initiatives that augment the academy’s efforts. The program offers a 12-year commitment to each student and their families, supporting them from 5th grade through college.
Before the various successes of San Miguel’s rowers made local news, Newburgh most often figured in Hudson Valley headlines because of drug arrests or shooting incidents. The once vibrant river town had fallen on hard times by the 1970s as manufacturing jobs, shops and residents fled and blight and drug gangs moved in. In 2011 Newburgh was described as “the murder capital of New York” in New York magazine. The handle stuck and the city’s unfortunate reputation seemed sealed.
Father Connell had been handling various teaching and parish assignments in the Archdiocese of New York when, in 1998, he became chaplain and the director of campus ministry at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, where he also worked as an adjunct professor in philosophy and theology. Part of that teaching assignment was connecting Mount Saint Mary students to the lives of the people in Newburgh.
He was troubled by the poverty he encountered and the hopelessness it engendered. When he shared his concern with parishioners at his weekend assignment at the Church of St. John and St. Mary in the well-to-do suburb of Chappaqua, just across the river in Westchester County but economic worlds away from Newburgh, connections began to be made.
Father Connell’s supporters in Westchester agreed that education was the best way to break generational cycles of poverty. These parishioners began networking and fundraising, pulling together the human and fiscal resources needed to open the San Miguel Academy in a former Catholic parish school in 2006 as an all-boys school serving students in fifth through eighth grades. Some of those founders continue to guide the program as members of its board of trustees. The San Miguel Program purchased the school property outright in 2020, the year San Miguel also went coed.
The academy is part of the NativityMiguel Coalition, a U.S. and Canadian network of faith-based school programs providing “financially accessible” education to students from low-income families in underserved communities.
The San Miguel Program currently serves over 250 students and their families. The San Miguel Academy covers the cost of tuition, supplies and most other related expenses for most students and accepts family contributions based on what individual families can manage. All of the students at the academy qualify for the federal school lunch program, and the school maintains a fund to help its graduates through high school and college.
The rowing team is a piece of Father Connell’s strategy to create opportunities for Newburgh’s young people, but he is convinced it is the kind of sport that can have a transformative effect anywhere it is tried. At San Miguel everyone rows, whether on the Hudson River as a member of one of the school’s rowing teams or on an ergometer, a fancy name for an indoor rowing machine, in the school gym.
While surveying the rows of “ergs” that have taken over the school’s gym, Father Connell assures, “We ‘erg’ every day.”
The older students who want to join the boats on the Hudson River have to prove themselves capable of surviving the inevitable capsizing or other misadventure on the water. They may be tossed overboard by an out-of-sync oar stroke; the San Miguel students have to be ready to swim, not sink.
San Miguel students also have come to appreciate how rowing can get them on a path to success. Many receive rowing scholarships that take them to regional high schools or faraway boarding schools.
But even before those potential outcomes, rowing teaches the San Miguel students teamwork and gets them away for a little while from the gritty world many inhabit in Newburgh. San Miguel boats typically compete against teams from fancier zip codes in rowing regattas in Philadelphia, Saratoga Springs, Hartford and other cities.
David Jimenez, who was 14 and an eighth grader when America spoke with him in May 2024, tries to explain what it is that he likes the most about rowing. “It’s calmer in the water,” he decides. “In Newburgh, there’s a lot of violence, but when you are out here on the water, it’s just you and your friends having a good time.”
His classmate Francisco Chihuahua agrees. Life in Newburgh can be troubled by gangs and guns, and rowing takes him away from that, but he also values how the sport “has made me a better person,” he says. “It’s made me more responsible.… It’s personally made me stronger, physically and mentally.”
“When I’m rowing on the ergs or on the water, it’s really, really hard,” he says, “but I have my coxswain,” the teammate who sets the pace, “and my friends supporting me no matter what happens.”
Rowing “helps you with everything,” David adds.
Mackenzie Nihill is a former teacher at San Miguel; she left in the fall of 2024 for a job at a public school. Her preteen students have seen a lot growing up in Newburgh, she says. “A lot of drugs and gang problems; some of the things that I know that they hear and they see is a lot for any 10-year-old.”
But rowing is more than an escape from all that. For some kids it is the start of physical and mental accomplishments they had to be taught they could achieve; for others it offers a first opportunity to work cooperatively toward a common goal.
That experience carries over into the classroom, Ms. Nihill says. “They have learned how getting along and working together gets them a better result. And I think rowing does that. You have to be doing it all together.”
A Quad’s Christening
On this afternoon excursion in May 2024, it is not long before Newburgh’s streets are in the rear view and the placid greenery of a picture postcard boat landing in the nearby village of Cornwall-on-Hudson lies ahead of us, a remarkably different perspective for these students in sixth through eighth grades. Today they are off to Donahue Memorial Park for the blessing and launching of two newly donated boats.
The kids pile out of vans and trucks and head for the trailer, where they unload a number of boats in a rush of organized chaos that quickly results in the assembly of rowing sculls for both the boys’ and the girls’ teams. The middle-schoolers have little trouble rigging the boats themselves and getting them into the river.
Among them is the Lucy D, a brand new four-seat boat (also known as a “quad”) that has been donated by a longtime supporter of the academy and Founders Council member, Patrick Donnelly, named in honor of his wife. Father Connell takes a few moments to bless the new racing scull before its noncompetitive maiden run across the Hudson.
On hand to welcome the students at Donahue Park is the mayor of Cornwall-on-Hudson, Jim Gagliano. (This April, his term as mayor ended, and he left Orange County politics.) He seems authentically delighted to welcome the San Miguel kids as they prepare for the blessing and launch of the Lucy D. That is likely because he knows how far they have come to get to this boat launch.
Before he made speeches as a politician, Mr. Gagliano served in a capacity that directly connected him to the students from San Miguel: He spent 25 years working as an F.B.I. agent, at one point heading up a task force devoted to driving the gangs out of Newburgh.
Neighborhood gangs were being pushed out by national criminal networks that local young men and women connected with while incarcerated. As big cities like New York instituted what would become model strategies to shut down crime during the 1990s, the national gangs saw smaller cities like Newburgh as safer arenas of opportunity. Turf wars quickly created chaos.
“Kids here [were] getting shot and killed in the crossfire, and we [had] to pay attention to it,” he says. “It was a tough time for Newburgh.” He led the Hudson Valley Safe Streets Task Force for four years between 2008 and 2012.
Mr. Gagliano first got a chance to observe the work of the San Miguel Academy in 2011. “I was in awe watching what they did there. I was very, very impressed,” he remembers.
“Rowing was the carrot that got the kids in the door. And then you give them the education, and you give them the structure and the discipline; that really rounds it out,” he says.
The F.B.I. task force chief became a fixture on Father Connell’s fundraising tours of Westchester, providing potential donors with “an idea of what it was like on the streets [in Newburgh] and what these kids were facing. And the folks were very, very generous.”
San Miguel rowers needed them to be. “With basketball, you find a piece of asphalt, you put up a hoop 10 feet high, you roll out a couple of worn-out basketballs, and everybody’s good,” Mr. Gagliano says. Rowing requires more logistics and capital investment, he says. The donor base for San Miguel that Father Connell was building has become essential to the success of San Miguel rowers and the academy itself.
When he became mayor in 2021, Mr. Gagliano was happy to allow the academy to use Donahue Park for boat launching and river training. “And believe it or not, as mayor, I got complaints about damn near anything and everything, but no one’s ever complained to me about San Miguel Academy and the kids being down there,” he said. “We’re rooting for the kids and Father Mark. And the track record of San Miguel Academy, with getting kids into colleges, has just been phenomenal.”
Standing Out, but Standing Together
Newburgh surely retains its share of civic challenges. In 2023, the city had a population of about 29,000 people. One in four residents lives below the poverty line, a rate 72 percent higher than the national average. More than 40 percent of Newburgh’s residents are eligible for Medicaid. But crime is down, especially related to gun violence, and real estate values in recent years have shot up.
About 22 percent of Newburgh residents were born outside the United States, well above the national average of about 14 percent. Fifty-one percent of Newburgh’s residents are Hispanic; 24 percent are Black; and 22 percent are non-Hispanic white. Most of the San Miguel students are immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants from Mexico and other nations of Latin America.
Do they feel a little bit like outsiders at competitions that are often hundreds of miles and several tax brackets away from Newburgh? Emiliano Cervantes, a seventh grader, says: “We don’t think about it. We just put our heads in the race and do our best.”
But Francisco, who serves as his boat’s coxswain, the team member who steers the boat and manages its rowing rhythm, acknowledges that it can be a little daunting when San Miguel goes up against more experienced and better financed teams that can monopolize the accolades at competitions.
“I just tell my boat that no matter what happens, that we gave it our all,” Francisco says, “and we should be proud of that and [know] that we can do better next time.” In fact, the San Miguel kids are doing pretty well already. In 2024, for the third year in a row, San Miguel rowers qualified for the under-15 national U.S. Rowing Youth Championship in Sarasota, Fla. One San Miguel team finished in fifth place and another in seventh.
Arshay Cooper joined the San Miguel students at the boat dedication, offering a pep talk that doubled as a personal testimonial to rowing. Mr. Cooper has achieved a degree of fame in the small world of U.S. rowing. He was a member of a rowing team out of Manly High School in Chicago that was the first all-Black rowing team in the nation. He wrote A Most Beautiful Thing, a memoir of that experience, and used its acclaim to begin the A Most Beautiful Thing Inclusion Fund.
The fund has been essential to the expansion of rowing at the academy. Mr. Cooper’s group has either provided the financing directly or helped secure grant money from other sources that has sponsored coaching and delivered a gymnasium full of the ergometer rowing machines the San Miguel kids use for off-river training.
Mr. Cooper clearly sees himself in these young rowers. His teen years, growing up in a troubled neighborhood in Chicago, easily parallels what the San Miguel kids experience in Newburgh.
“Just hearing gunshots when I slept and losing friends because of gun violence,” he recalls, “mother not being around half the time. Father never around, not doing well at school, being chased, being bullied.” Then he was introduced to rowing and “everything changed.”
The kids surrounding Mr. Cooper on the dark grass of this riverside park do not have to strain to imagine what he is talking about. Like he did, these students are seeking an escape on the water, rowing for their lives.
“This was the only sport that calmed the storm in me, being out there, developing that magical rhythm with your teammates, sitting tall, learning how to breathe…leading the person behind you, following the person in front of you,” he says. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me. This is what that boat does.”
The sport has meant much to him; his delight in watching the kids head off onto the river pulling oars on their new boats is contagious. “Talent is everywhere,” Mr. Cooper says, “but access and opportunity are not,” explaining his determination to create more chances for disadvantaged kids to have a shot at team rowing.
Jency Pineda, a San Miguel eighth grader, says other kids in town do not quite understand her love of rowing. “Because they’re more into sports like soccer or basketball, and they think it’s just crazy to be out in the river,” she says, adding quietly, “but I think it’s beautiful.”
Even more than the natural beauty she encounters on the Hudson, she has come to appreciate the new opportunities and perspectives that rowing has opened up for her. “I think beyond what other kids my age think for my future,” she says. That’s something her parents, who came to the United States from El Salvador “with nothing,” also value about rowing.
San Miguel connected Jency with a boarding school in Virginia, St. Margaret’s, which she began attending in September 2024. Pondering that upcoming big move in her life, which at the time of our conversation was just a few months away, she says, “I do get nervous sometimes, but I’m looking forward to it.”
Rowing remains something of an elite pastime, but more and more children and teens from all kinds of backgrounds are finding their way to it. Mr. Cooper too had been an outlier when he lifted his first oar. It can be tough on these young people, he admits.
“There’s a lot of code switching,” Mr. Cooper says. “‘Can I be me? Can I be myself?’ And sometimes people are just staring at you…not speaking to you.” It can feel “like an away game all the time.”
But the kids, he knows, “have each other” to depend on in such moments. They also have a commitment from the school they can count on. In its promotional material, San Miguel attests that it is committed to “changing the trajectory of our students’ lives.”
That is no mere public relations; admission is accompanied by enrollment in the school’s Graduate Success Program, a 12-year effort that will follow these middle school students all the way through high school, college or wherever their post-San Miguel years takes them.
The program boasts a 98 percent high school graduation rate. San Miguel students are performing at a variety of challenging programs, including “independent day and boarding secondary schools and accelerated public school programs.” After high school, San Miguel graduates “pursue the path that’s right for them, including college, trade school, and the military.”
Rowing is a component of the program that ties body and mind and discipline and effort together. Success is an expectation, not a surprise.
“I want to get into a good high school and college, and row in high school and college, and I hope to row in the Olympics,” Emiliano says.
The other students join in, talking about scholarships to high schools and colleges, graduating with diplomas from Ivy League institutions, and then coming home to Newburgh to help their working-class parents retire with dignity. It does not sound like wishful thinking.
This article appears in November 2025.
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