Nelson Torres plops down on the top of a picnic table and gazes out over the Genesee River, his eyes shielded by sunglasses, his red baseball cap turned backwards, and his thick gray moustache topping off a huge smile.

Torres watches as four other members of the Cross Currents minority rowing team carry a four-person fiberglass shell down to one of the launches at the Genesee Waterways Center in Genesee Valley Park. (Torres, a team co-captain, can't participate in tonight's practice; knee problems have forced him to sit out a year. "I'm under doctor's orders," he says with a sigh. "Nada.")

The four women hauling the boat exemplify the spirit of the Cross Currents club - Lisa Norwood and Lydia Boddie-Rice are African-American, Alicia Hernandez is Panamanian, and Patricia Rozzo is of Colombian descent.

Under a beautiful blue sky and amidst the cooling breeze of the river, the rowers wait for their coxswain, UR undergrad Arieanto Sutrisno, to give the orders to board the shell in unison.

The four women and Sutrisno, who is of Indonesian heritage, proceed to move in unison as they settle into the boat, get a handle on their oars, and push off from the dock. With Sutrisno calling out directions with a microphone headset, the crew starts to glide down the river for a rigorous two-hour practice.

As this happens, Torres watches the women with pride. The diversity present in the boat tonight is the result of two years of hard work and faith - faith that the Cross Currents team would one day become a model for the nationwide effort to bring minorities into the formerly lily-white sport of rowing.

"These women," Torres says with a grin, "don't mess around."

Torres has beenwith Cross Currents since the very beginning in June 2006, when the Waterways Center, Rochester Gas & Electric, and the city of Rochester's Bureau of Parks and Recreation combined to launch an initiative aimed at increasing ethnic and cultural diversity at the GWC,a non-profit organization that brings rowing, kayaking, canoeing, and other water sports to local sports enthusiasts.

At the core of that effort is the Cross Currents team, which, in just two years, has grown so much that now, during the regular season that runs from April to October, it regularly participates in several regattas and other competitions in the Rochester area and beyond, including the Head of the Genesee corporate challenge and the Pittsford Regatta. (During winter, the team practices indoors at the Pittsford Indoor Rowing Center and the Jewish Community Center.) The team roster includes roughly 30 core members of both genders and a cornucopia of backgrounds. Participants' ages run from the teens to the 60s, but most members are in their 40s and 50s.

But that progress hasn't come easily. "It's been hard pulling this group together," Torres says, "but we came together, and now we do it all together."

Lydia Boddie-Rice first came in contact with the sport of rowing as a student at Brown University; the school has a tradition-laden varsity program, which initially piqued her interest.

Once her daughter took up rowing as a student at Northeastern University, Boddie-Rice began to fall under the sport's spell. Always eager to try out new ways of keeping in shape, she learned about the Genesee Waterways Center through a colleague at RG&E, where Boddie-Rice serves as the manager of public affairs and outreach.

She gave the GWC a try, and she was hooked. The center's director at the time, Dennis Money, approached Boddie-Rice about creating a minority rowing program. As someone who works in public outreach for a career, she signed on immediately, and the genesis of the Cross Currents team was formed.

Money and Boddie-Rice quickly established one of the primary goals of the outreach program - making the sport of rowing affordable for everyone. Boddie-Rice turned to RG&E for help, and the company volunteered to provide the Cross Currents team with the majority of the club's funding. Over the last two years, the GWC has received nearly $40,000 in donations for Cross Currents from various sources.

RG&E's donations, along with gifts from other sponsors and the efforts of several political leaders like State Rep. David Gantt and state Sen. Joe Robach, have helped subsidize the program's training and learn-to-row process - beginner sessions cost upwards of $200- providing financial aid to minorities who otherwise couldn't take up the sport.

"We need to take economics out of the equation," Boddie-Rice says. "The goal is to raise enough money for classes so no one is turned away."

Rozzo was one of the crew members to benefit from the largesse of the club's sponsors, for which she is extremely grateful.

"If it wasn't for the Cross Currents program, I don't know if I could afford [rowing]," Rozzo says. "If you really want to get minorities into rowing, it has to be subsidized somehow."

But the crowning achievement of the unique public-private outreach partnership came in July 2007, with the purchase of a brand-new, state-of-the-art eight-person shell for the minority team. The Joule - named to honor the power company's fundraising efforts - has now become the team's jewel (pun definitely intended), a source of pride and inspiration for the members of the team, which already uses the boat in competition.

Looking back on the last two years, Boddie-Rice still marvels at how her efforts - and the resulting growth of the team - developed out of a simple fitness excursion on her part.

"What started as a personal quest turned into a social initiative," she says.

Other team members laud Boddie-Rice for her ability to raise money for the crew and coordinate the schedules and talents of so many diverse people. "Lydia is like the brain," says Torres.

Thus, what began as a small group of devoted club founders - Money, Boddie-Rice, Torres, and a few others - has evolved into quite a sight to behold, Boddie-Rice says.

"We are truly a diverse team," she says. "We're really quite a spectacle. We are diverse by profession, age, background - by any paradigm you can imagine."

That feeling of togetherness, and devotion to success, has been forged partly by the very nature of the sport of rowing, say many of the team's members. More mainstream sports like football, basketball, and baseball often produce individual standouts, athletes who rise above the rest and even single-handedly carry a team to success.

But such star-making is practically impossible with a crew, where every single crew member must be completely in sync with everyone else. If any one rower sticks out from the rest, the team literally cannot function. Says Torres: "When you get in a boat, you throw your egos out. Everybody has to do it together."

It's a lesson that's been learned not only by dozens of adult team members, but also by numerous teenagers who have come aboard the Cross Currents boat.

"Everybody has to work together or you won't get a good outcome," says 17-year-old Amanda Taylor, a senior at Nazareth Academy. "You have to learn to work with people. It brings people together."

That dedication to the group, to a single, shared purpose, has served to unite the members of the Cross Currents team regardless of each member's ethnic or economic background. It's such camaraderie that attracts, and then retains, membership.

"It's like a really connected sport," says the 48-year-old Rozzo. "When I first tried it, I was like, ‘Where has this sport been all my life?' It was love at first row."

For some crew members, however, adapting to the team-first mentality was a little difficult, especially for people who were used to succeeding as individuals in their careers.

"The most difficult thing was being part of a team," says Norwood, 44, the assistant dean of engineering at the University of Rochester. "We are all at the pinnacle of our careers, but once you get in that boat, you have to shut your mouth and listen to one person."

However, club members say the extreme mental and physical effort it takes to become an experienced, veteran, team rower is almost always worth it. The sense of shared accomplishment, they say, is a powerful thing.

"When it comes together, when people are trusting one another, it's really nice," says Torres. Adds Norwood: "There's nothing to compare it to."

The Rochester Cross Currents club seems to be one of the guiding lights in a growing movement across the country to bring diversity to the sport of rowing. Dwayne H. Adams Jr. of Philadelphia, who founded Breaking Barriers, one of the nation's first minority-aimed crew clubs, says such efforts are popping up in places as geographically diverse as Chicago, Pittsburgh, and cities in Oklahoma.

After a shooting left him sightless in one eye and partially blind in the other, Adams dedicated himself to becoming a championship rower. At the same time, he founded Breaking Barriers, a non-profit rowing organization based in Philadelphia, in July 2005. The goal of the group, he said, is to spread the word about rowing to people who otherwise wouldn't give it a second thought.

Adams learned about the Cross Currents team when he was contacted by Oscar Pedroso, a member of the Rochester club who had read an article featuring Breaking Barriers. Since then, the Rochester and Philadelphia clubs have joined together in their efforts, with Adams offering advice and moral support.

"I'm very impressed with Cross Currents," says Adams, who is in the process of scheduling a rowing clinic in Rochester. "They can be great partners with us up north. I want to come and help them with anything they do. They're getting it done."

Adams says the key to introducing diversity to rowing is outreach and education, something both Breaking Barriers and Cross Currents are actively doing, with a special focus on youth.

"We need more publicity," he says. "That's what's going to get it done. We have to put the word out and let minority youth know that it's a sport that's accessible to them and that there are ways to make contact and get involved with people."

Of course, that's no easy task when many minority youth grew up playing basketball or football and have no idea what a rowing crew is.

"It's not a sport we really know about," says Torres, who is hoping to schedule visits to city schools and classrooms. "This is totally contrary to everything we do."

And he knows from personal experience how daunting rowing can be at first.

"We didn't know squatola when we started," he says. "When we first got in (a shell), we didn't know what to do."

However, the Rochester club has been fortunate to have the help of several experienced volunteers in the effort, including Nicole Fulle, Money's successor as GWC's director, and Nicholas Baish, who recently signed on as the team's new coach.

Fulle has squared her focus on introducing city youths to rowing. The GWC has started to make inroads, she says, but there's still a ways to go.

"It's important to give kids the awareness that rowing is an option from a young age," she says. "We've had some success with that, but not as much as we'd like."

Baish, who has been rowing since middle school and coaching for the last eight years, acknowledges that during his years in the sport, the vast majority of his peers and opponents have been white. However, he says, he hopes to help the Cross Currents program remain accessible to all.

"This sport," he says, "is open to everyone."

Once minority youth see that diversity first-hand, says Boddie-Rice, the sport becomes less imposing and more welcoming.

"When you actually see your peers in the environment, when you feel comfortable, that is the template that attracts interest," she says.

Everyone involved in the GWC's minority-outreach program recognizes that the Cross Currents team is still in its infancy, taking baby steps as it searches for long-term stability. They know that the club's goal of increasing diversity in a predominately white, middle-to-upper-class sport is one that will never really end.

While the team has made significant progress, there are still countless numbers of minority youth who are waiting to be reached, and the club's members and supporters understand that reaching of them will be a difficult task.

But, they add, it will all be worth it. Says Torres: "We're trying to do some really wonderful things."

For more information on the Cross Currents program, call 328-3960 or e-mail crosscurrents@geneseewaterways.org.