Lark Skov: From The Mountains To The Water
From the Summer, 2020, edition of SWEEP Magazine
Music and the mountains shaped Lark Skov's young life, creating an instrumentalist and competitive skier who dreamed of following those passions into college. She never imagined shifting her goals from the peaks of Colorado to the waters of Montlake.
At summer music camp before her senior year of high school, Lark realized that the grueling work of studying to be a career musician might "become a chore" and destroy her love for the violin and viola. In addition, an earlier injury had sidelined her from the slopes and eventually dashed her hopes for joining a skiing team in college.
Suddenly, she had no sport and no potential major. What to do? Her skiing coach suggested trying out for a rowing team."
UW was on my radar even before then," recalls Lark. "My main goal was to go to a big school in a big city because I'd grown up in a small Colorado skiing town and wanted something new. I had no idea UW had one of the best rowing teams in the country."
A friend of her dad's taught her to row on an ergometer, so she felt well prepared going into open tryouts for the Washington Women's Rowing team her freshman year.
"It was a three-week-long tryout — running, erging, strength training and working with the recruited freshmen," Lark says. "I got to be in a boat a few times in tryouts and it was an unreal experience. I was so excited to make the team.
"To say she took to the water well is an understatement. Lark's career with the Huskies includes rowing in many championship boats along with earning a bronze medal in the U.S. women's eight at the 2019 World Rowing Under 23 Championships.
"I love the team aspect of rowing, the relationship between the individual and the team, and the connection between the people in the boat and the oar in the water," muses Lark, who successfully received more generous scholarships in each of her last three years. "Every day, we're all in awe of what UW and our donors make possible for us."
After earning a degree in linguistics (the music of language instead of strings), Lark will return for a fifth year of rowing and graduate studies in communications leadership this coming season.