Written by Kate Metalli, Growth Marketing Manager at Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?:
“The more experience I gain in my career in business and rowing, the more I see the parallels between high performance in both. In our consultancy work we help get our clients thinking around their strategic ambitions. When setting their Crazy Goal it often helps using the phrase “Wouldn’t it be amazing if…?”. Some of the goals can range from “… we lead the way in our industry” to “…to be recommended by everybody” or “…people love to work for us, customers love to work with us”.
For me, my personal Crazy Goal was the Wargrave Challenge Cup.
Below, I share my journey to achieving it, the performance ingredients that I believe were crucial and how you can use these to help you in what you’re looking to achieve so you can go out and grab it.”


My journey toward my dream of winning at Henley began over four years ago. Henley Royal Regatta introduced the Wargrave Challenge Cup for Club Women’s eights and I had actually just quit rowing. But I knew instantly with that announcement that I wanted to return—not just to compete, but to win.
I was a part of a number of different teams each aiming for the Wargrave and despite different approaches, (in a similar way to Ben and his Gold medal!) we always fell short of our goal. In January 2023, I joined Thames Rowing Club, alongside starting my new role at Will It? The club’s culture of high performance mirrored the principles we discussed at work everyday. Thames felt different, and I believed this culture, mentality and environment could help us reach new heights.
Through Thames’s infamously gruelling tests, I was ecstatic to be selected for Thames’ first women’s eight for the Wargrave Challenge Cup at Henley in May. Our goal was clear: to win. As a team we needed to quickly find our feet. As is often the case in the business world, we didn’t have long for a group of individuals to try and gel and become greater than the sum of our parts. What started as our timid and quiet crew developed into an engaged team who weren’t afraid to tell it as they see it and who would actively offer ideas in search of any gains.
But that didn’t come easily. We had to work at it.
In the months leading up to the regatta we worked more and more on our bond as a team. Looking back it was as much about how we worked to become a better team as it was working on our physical rowing. Don’t get me wrong, the hours in the gym/on the erg, the early mornings on the water, and the constant fatigue are the harsh reality of rowing and are certainly important. But how effectively we worked together as a team was crucial to our success. As Ben says in the Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? book, “you’ve got to work on the team as much as you do the outcome”!
I would boil down our performance ingredients and what gave us our competitive edge to three key factors:
- Establishing our Team Rules – We articulated and agreed what behaviours as a crew got the best out of us
- Sharing our ‘What’s in it for me?’ – We shared why we each wanted it as a team
- Building our belief – We used an evidence wall to remind ourselves we could do it
1) Establishing our Team Rules
This season presented a fairly unique set of challenges to say the least. Some of them were beyond the normal ones associated with competition and sport! The raw sewage being pumped into the Thames day after day brought with it it’s own set of problems. Brown residue sticking to our wellie boots as we came in from the session and a number of people absent from weekend sessions with ‘Tideway Tummy’ became commonplace. Getting back into the swing of training after a weekend lying on the bathroom floor all night isn’t what I had in mind when picturing the glory of winning at Henley!
Competition for spaces on the boat also amps up the pressure to perform. As you can easily track who is moving between boats session to session you can read between the lines as to who is likely to be selected and moved up or down between ‘A’ and ‘B’ crews. This can lead to tensions between boats but also to you questioning your own performance and standing among others.
These were just two of the many challenges presented to us throughout the year. The articulation of our Team Rules as a team were integral to how we adapted and overcame these and how we got the best out of ourselves as a crew.
We had rules for everything e.g. taking hand sanitiser in the boat with us to limit the chances of getting ill. We had a rule around making sure each boat was the best you can make it, which were critical in our success as a team to be able to perform at our best. As a crew this enabled us to be of one-mindset to be able to perform at our highest level possible.


2) What’s in it for me?
On the first night in our Henley house, we each shared our personal journeys and what winning meant to us. This exercise brought us closer, making our shared goal even more meaningful as we understood the individual motivations driving each of us.
One of the girls shared that for her the regatta was a key part of the town she’d grown up in and always wanted to be a part of it.
I personally shared the four-year journey I’d been on. Ahead of this point, I’d reached the Wargrave Challenge cup semi-final three times (since event inception), and every single time lost to the ‘Thames A’ crew on the Saturday. Each time it had ended in bitter disappointment. Each time I never had the opportunity to compete on the much coveted Henley Sunday.
Another of the girls then shared that it was her final year, and having been in a similar situation to me for the last number of years, this was her last chance to compete to call herself a Henley winner.
Hearing the variety of differing reasons brought us together even more as a team. We understood that whilst we all wanted the same goal, we had very different reasons as to what achieving it would mean to us. It really got us to step into each other’s shoes and understand what makes each other tick.
Moving into the racing our cox utilised a number of our reasonings in order to motivate each other when up against another crew. The calls of ‘last chance’ or ‘4 years’ really resonated with every individual in the crew, knowing what it all meant to each other.
3) Building our belief through use of an evidence wall
After a disappointing performance at Henley Women’s Regatta two weeks before the big race, our performance was not where it needed to be.
Through our review sessions we realized morale was low. We needed to re-build confidence in our abilities and get our rhythm back. We realised belief was our missing link and it led us to create our crew “evidence wall”. On day 2 of Henley training camp, our coach presented us with a canvas to use as our evidence wall. We used this every day to remind us of our fitness, past performances, and the support we had. Every race added new evidence that fuelled our confidence and belief that we could do it.
That evening, we once again sat down and began to share ideas of our evidence to provide the belief that we could achieve our goal. This included a number of test PBs that individuals had achieved throughout the year, proving we were as fit as we were at that moment. We shared how we each believed in each other as a way of encouraging each other and reinforcing our Team Rule of ‘You are supported by the Thames ‘army’’.


As each race went by, we continued to add to the wall with facts and evidence from the racing we’d just completed.
The board became a staple in the house we were staying in. Whenever I had a moment of nerves or of wavering, I went to go and look at it. It truly gave me the belief of what we’d done so far as a collective, in each other, as well as myself to think ‘we can do this’.
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The Sunday morning of Henley came, and I was honestly the most nervous I’d ever felt. I managed to choke down about a quarter of my usual amount of pre-race fuel, through fear of seeing it again before the race!
Ahead of the final race, I remember being hit by a moment of clarity. We were all sat down in the boat tents doing our own pre-race preparations. I looked around at our crew and knew in that moment that everyone there would give it their all. Each and every one of us knew with such clarity what we needed to do in that race.
I can never usually remember a race, but bizarrely I could recite this one stroke by stroke from memory. We put into practise exactly all we’d focused on over the previous weeks into a performance we were all proud of. Ultimately the performance took care of the result.


Whilst I was one of those lucky enough to be standing on that podium on the Sunday of Henley in the end, it was truly a full team effort. Often in sports, you don’t see the team behind the team but without which it wouldn’t have been possible. This includes all our coaching team, a number of which volunteers who guided and helped us at various points as well as the entirety of the squad at Thames rowing club. Without the whole team pushing and striving in pursuit of the goal, it would not have been possible.
We are so exceptionally proud of Kate and her journey to achieving her ‘Crazy Goal’ of winning at Henley. As a company we are experts in helping companies craft their strategic Crazy Goal and developing the leaders and teams to achieve it. If you’d like to learn more about how we might be able to do the same then feel free to get in touch.
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