HSB25 HIGH ACHIEVERS: Late switch to rowing sends Henrik Neuspiel to Dartmouth College

By Martin Cleary

Henrik Neuspiel is a natural athlete.

Pick a sport and he has likely given it a try and had success in his journey.

Sport was a natural avenue to follow as his father Victor competed in three world championships in kayaking and his mother Margaret Nelson Neuspiel played for Canada’s women’s water polo squad.

For the past dozen years, he has been recognized as a hockey player in the winter and a flatwater sprint kayaker in the summer. But he’s more than just a two-sport athlete.

During his three years of studying in the High Performance Athlete program at John McCrae Secondary School, he participated in varsity rugby and track and field. In his first two years of high school, he was the top novice (while attending Merivale High School) and junior shot put thrower at the National Capital Secondary School Athletic Association and Eastern Ontario levels. He competed at the 2023 OFSAA championships in boys’ junior shot put.

His performances in track and rugby earned him the school’s top athlete award in each sport in 2023.

As a Grade 9 student-athlete at Merivale, he was selected the junior athlete of the year for his overall efforts.

Neuspiel also has been known to play on his high school basketball and volleyball teams and compete in cross-country running races in the fall and cross-country skiing events in the winter.

As for hockey, he climbed as high as a U16 AA-level defenceman and played Canada’s national winter sport for 12 years.

His summers were spent at the Rideau Canoe Club, starting in week-long, learn-to-paddle canoe programs before graduating to provincial, national and international championships, where he has won 54 medals, including 30 gold.

But during his last several hockey and kayaking seasons, the 6’5″ 18-year-old was trying to work a new sport into his repertoire – rowing.

For the past four years, he has attended the RBC Training Ground tryout sessions at the University of Ottawa. It’s an opportunity for young athletes to be tested in front of technical recruiters from a variety of Canadian sport governing bodies.

More than 2,000 athletes take part in this athletic showcase and the top 30 are declared RBC Olympians and awarded financial assistance packages with the goal of making a specific national team. While Neuspiel didn’t qualify for the top 30 each year, he attracted some interest from rowing.

“I hadn’t grown out of kayaking. I love it. But rowing was a really good opportunity for me,” explained Neuspiel about switching sports late in his youth.

While rowing was now on his sports agenda, he didn’t act on it immediately. He wanted to savour the end of his junior kayaking career with some international flavour.

Neuspiel started to tinker with rowing last year by doing some ERG testing, where he was timed over 2,000 metres on a stationary rowing machine. His scores were eye popping and attention grabbing. His sports career is now devoted to rowing.

He has committed to attend Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire for the 2025-26 academic year and will race for The Big Green as a freshman.

Rowing Canada also has seen his potential as well as three other Ottawa Rowing Club teammates, who have been named to represent Canada at the Intercontinental Rowing Challenge on July 15-16 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Neuspiel will be joined by Max Froeschl, Jack Coulson and Samaya Khosla.

“I have been in contact with Zak Lewis (Ottawa Rowing Club head coach) for quite a while, after he reached out to me three to four years ago,” Neuspiel said. “He accommodated me. I didn’t want to jump in it right away.”

Neuspiel signed off on his youth kayaking career in 2024 by competing for Canada at the World Junior Sprint Canoe Championships in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and the Canoe Sprint Olympic Hopes Regatta in Szeged, Hungary.

At the Olympic Hopes, he won a silver medal in the K2 500-metre final. At the world juniors, he helped Canada to a sixth-place showing in the boys’ K4 500-metre final, which was the country’s best result in that discipline in 10 years.

While Neuspiel hasn’t started serious racing as a rower, he has taken part in regular ERG ranking sessions. He is considered the top male junior on the Canadian ERG rankings and has a personal-best time of six minutes and seven seconds for 2,000 metres.

At six feet, five inches, Neuspiel has an ideal frame for rowing, is fit from his years of kayaking with a double-bladed paddle and has a powerful engine to cut through the water now with one or two oars.

Rowing also allowed him the valuable tool to chase a university education at an Ivy League school. Ivy League schools offer grant-in-aid rather than full or partial scholarships to its student-athletes and rowing is one of those eligible varsity sports. Kayaking or canoeing isn’t a varsity sport in Canada or the United States.

“I saw more opportunities in rowing. Once I tested (on the ERG), I liked it,” explained Neuspiel, an honours high school student with a high 80s average. “It was a no-brainer not to get into it.”

Neuspiel made the maximum five visits to American universities to study the academics, the campuses and the rowing programs at Princeton, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and Stanford.

“I was fortunate I could go fast on the ERG,” he added. “It gave me a lot of leverage. I had quite a good number of schools (recruit me). I was fortunate to have a choice.”

He plans to study either chemical engineering or finance at Dartmouth, whose head coach is Wyatt Allen, an Olympic gold medallist at the 2004 Athens Summer Games and a bronze-medal winner at the 2008 Athens Games in the men’s eights.

“It will definitely be an uphill battle,” Neuspiel said about his freshman rowing season. “The program has 40 to 50 guys. I don’t expect to push the top boats immediately. I want to work hard under their guidance.

“In my first year, I will not be the fastest. In the second, third and fourth years, I want to enjoy the whole process and come out with success through hard work and improvement.”

Neuspiel is in the early days of developing into a rower. He was successful going forward as a kayaker. Now, he wants to do the same, but going backwards.

“Personally, I need to be more comfortable. I’ll start slow. Then, I’ll move up and up to a comfortable racing speed,” he outlined.

“Rowing was always what I wanted to end up doing. It was a little delayed.”

Read More of our 2025 High School Best Series as we tip our caps to top local student-athletes at: OttawaSportsPages.ca/Ottawa-High-School-Best-2025