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"I would rather kill myself than row another year here."
Current and former members of Stanford's men's rowing team say head coach Ted Sobolewski and associate head coach John Pojednic, at Stanford since 2019 and 2023, have built a program defined by physical and psychological abuse. They describe scholarship promises made during recruiting and quietly dropped once athletes arrived, as well as a culture that punishes anyone who questions how the team is run.
In conversations with current rowers and on-the-record interviews with several former athletes who left the program, the Review found that at least three current rowers have contemplated suicide, and three were pressured to do a maximal 2km test on the ergometer while sick with pneumonia. The senior class, which once held 9 recruited rowers, is now down to 2, with 3 more rowers leaving the program this academic year and 3 the year before. There are currently 14 recruited rowers and coxswains walking around campus rather than rowing for the team.
"I'm watching my friends die in front of me," one current rower said of his teammates. "Watching them get torn down by Ted and John."
The athletes who spoke to the Review described a program that pushed them to train while sick or injured, punished those who questioned the coaches, and operated selection and recruiting processes that athletes could neither understand nor trust. Their accounts span multiple recruiting classes and several seasons. They were first put to the university in writing more than two years ago, in a signed letter that several of the rowers say led to an investigation that changed nothing.
Five former rowers, most of whom were national or international rowing champions before coming to Stanford, agreed to speak on the record. Arthur Scott, who won Eton College's Faber Cup for top sportsman in 2023 and captained the Eton boats, chose Stanford over Yale when the Yale program was in the middle of a streak of national championships, but left the team this year. Schuyler Audley-Williams, a junior who rowed in the 2022 National Championship-winning Eton crew alongside Scott, left the program in fall 2025 after two years in which he says the coaches consistently disregarded the athletes' health and well-being. Lucas Johnson, who left Stanford after winter quarter of his sophomore year, provided the Review with text messages from Sobolewski that pressured him to train through illness. Finn Stäblein, a German Junior World Champion recruited in 2022, described being pushed to "try harder" through a serious illness and recurring rib injuries. One rower, an international competitor who was among the fastest single scullers in his home country, left the team after the coaches mishandled his back injury — involving multiple bulged and collapsed discs — that his own national team doctors had warned should be allowed to heal. Another former rower described being physically confronted, verbally abused, and jabbed in the chest by Pojednic after the coaches learned that athletes had raised concerns. All describe a program that pushed athletes to train while sick and/or injured, punished those who questioned the coaches, and operated selection processes that athletes could not understand.
In a written account provided to the Review, Scott explained that when he caught a cold, Pojednic told him the best way to recover was to train more and "cough it up." On another occasion, when several athletes were coughing on the water, Scott said Sobolewski told them, "That was the last cough," a remark Scott took to mean that symptoms should be suppressed.
Scott later suffered a back spasm severe enough to put him into shock, and he said he was given only three days on a stationary bike before being returned to regular training. When he reported that his back pain had not gone away, he said the coaches responded, "That's what happens when you take proper strokes," and then made him perform a drill that he describes as the hardest in the program on one's back. During the same period, Scott said, he developed heart palpitations that forced him to take a month off, and he still suffers latent symptoms.
Johnson provided the Review with a text message Sobolewski sent him after Johnson told the coach he was not well enough to complete a long run. The message reads, in part, "Unless you have a fever or are currently unable to hold food down, I think you should run. I know there are other guys who also aren't 100%, but they're going to find a way to get it done." Johnson ran and came down with a fever shortly afterward.
In a longer written account, Johnson said Sobolewski coined the phrase "baby cough" and used it in team meetings whenever an athlete was sick, framing illness as something to be powered through rather than treated. He also said the coaches discouraged coronavirus testing in 2022, even though some athletes had symptoms, despite the fact that, in his words, "I know at least two people whose lives would be seriously threatened by COVID, so knowing guys from my team were running around knowing they had COVID but refusing to test was sickening." Johnson left the team and the university after his sophomore winter, having been a member of the Varsity Eight his freshman year.
One former rower's account describes the same pressure to train through serious injury. He developed back pain and spasms on the rowing machine during his first quarter on the team, and he said Sobolewski pressured him to keep training through them. Over the winter break, he was treated by physiotherapists at a national Olympic training center in his home country, and his doctors advised against an early return to California for the team's winter camp, writing that he was "clearly not ready to return to rowing" and would "need several weeks to build training tolerance." Sobolewski ordered him back anyway, the rower said, and the week that followed had him on a stationary bike his doctors had warned against, without medical attention until the end of camp, while his back worsened. "I was several times put through erg progressions even though I was not getting any better," he said. "I would spasm each time. It was so bad that my back would spasm while sitting doing work." He said he repeatedly asked to run instead, as his doctors had recommended, and was refused each time because he "had to show up to practice for the team." The pattern continued until Sobolewski told him the "train was leaving the station" and that he could either "get on the train or get off." He quit at the end of the winter quarter.
Stäblein's account is similar. He was recruited in January 2022, five months after winning the Junior World Championships. Still, a severe reaction to a coronavirus vaccine left him with nervous system problems that kept him from training for a period. When his performance lagged after he arrived, he said, Sobolewski grew impatient and pressed him to push harder, and even encouraged the team captains to tell him he needed to try more, which strained his relationships with teammates. "If I weren't able and willing to try hard, I wouldn't have been a Junior World Champion training mostly by myself for my entire rowing career, in a small club with only two professional rowers," Stäblein said. He said the coaches tied his struggles to his standing at Stanford, recalling that in an April 2023 meeting, Pojednic told him, "I don't know what they are going to do about your scholarship if you're not able to step up your performance." A rib injury that developed as he changed rowing disciplines kept him out of practice three times, and he said Sobolewski did not allow him enough recovery time, forcing him back and worsening the injury. "Ted lacks the ability to be a good coach," Stäblein said, "because he lacks the interpersonal skills that great coaches need."
Tibor Thompson struggled with a sleep disorder that weakened his immune system and left him with repeated respiratory infections. Athletes said Sobolewski increased pressure on the team to train through illness even as Thompson grew sicker. One morning, his throat had swollen so badly from infection that he could barely breathe or swallow. After he attended training anyway, under pressure to perform, he ended up in the hospital. Jacopo Mascitelli, a junior world championship silver medalist, was made to keep training through a worsening hand infection during his freshman winter, athletes said, until the infection cost him the spring season and required surgery and a long recovery. Athletes said both outcomes would have been avoidable had the rowers been allowed to rest.
In his account to the Review, Audley-Williams also raised what he described as potential NCAA rule violations. The NCAA limits in-season athletically related activities to twenty hours a week, and Audley-Williams said the team regularly trained beyond that limit while pressuring athletes not to report the overage on required end-of-year forms. "Some athletes were afraid a truthful response could lead to backlash," he said, "so they either under-reported hours or avoided the form entirely."
At least three current rowers have contemplated suicide, according to teammates who spoke with the Review, and several athletes on the team have begun working with mental health professionals over the past year. One current rower told teammates that life as a Stanford athlete had "sapped his will" and that he had thought about killing himself because it had become too difficult to keep showing up for his teammates and for himself. Wilder Fulford, a senior who left the team one year ago and remains close with many of his former teammates, watched "as [his] friends' health and sense of hope deteriorated from week to week" over the course of the season. He says, "No sight is so depressing as to see bright, kind boys become husks, showing no sign of the flair and confidence I know they have."
Athletes said the coaches treat concern for mental health as a sign of weakness. One described a teammate explaining his absence as being down to injury, rather than a mental health issue, to avoid stigma within the program. Athletes said Sobolewski has stated in meetings that he wants nothing to do with sports psychology and does not believe it has a role on the team. A current rower, who asked not to be named because he feared retaliation, told the Review that the situation is widely understood among the athletes. "People are very depressed," he said. "Training and rowing at Stanford should be the best thing you do, but under these conditions, if you're fully bought in, you'll be sad about the whole thing."
Athletes described several cases of scholarships promised during recruiting and never delivered. One rower was told a scholarship would be awarded before he arrived on campus. It never materialized, and his family took on additional work to keep him at Stanford. Another, recruited as one of the program's top prospects, was promised money that never materialized and left the team within weeks of arriving. Two recruits who were not American citizens were told during the recruiting process that Stanford does not offer athletic scholarships to international students, according to Audley-Williams and other athletes who spoke to the Review. That statement is not true under NCAA rules, and both recruits later learned that other international athletes on the team had received scholarships.
Both current and former athletes told the Review that coaches punish anyone who questions them, ranging from boat demotions to public humiliation. In one incident this spring, athletes said, a rower asked Pojednic to clarify the purpose of a drill, and Pojednic responded by shouting at him over a megaphone for roughly half an hour, returning multiple times to yell at the athlete in front of other boats on the water. The athlete was then pulled from the boats and left behind on two subsequent trips, even though athletes said he had earned his seat by every measure available to them.
In a separate episode, another rower pushed back during a drill over how the coaches described his technique and was demoted the next day, athletes said. A captain later told the athlete that Sobolewski had asked whether he had "got the memo." Scott, in his account, described selection in the program as "opaque, inconsistent, and often arbitrary," with seat races judged by eye on a curved stretch of water without video reference, and the standards for selection shifting from one week to the next. He said the coaches would break up a lower boat after it had a strong session to keep it from challenging the top boat. "It felt as though there was an active effort to make the 2V worse so that the 1V would look better," he said.
Scott said he also witnessed coaching conduct directed at his teammates that he found disturbing. He said he saw Pojednic shout at an athlete and physically push him in public, and that on another occasion, he saw Pojednic berate an athlete and later deny the incident had occurred. After Scott left the program, he said, the team's next practice opened with a coach's speech describing departed athletes as people who "just can't take it" and were "too weak to succeed."
Pojednic confronted an athlete in April 2024 after the coaches learned that an athlete had raised concerns about the program. Pojednic approached him aggressively in front of his teammates, jabbed a finger into his chest, and shouted, "Are you fucking full of shit? You are fucking phony." When the athlete asked whether they could step away and discuss his concerns calmly, he said Pojednic refused, telling him, "No, we are going to do this here in front of your teammates." The athlete said it was the first time in his life he had felt physically afraid of a coach. He said Sobolewski watched the whole incident and afterward told the rest of the top boat that Pojednic had acted that way "because he cares so much," and told the athlete two days later that the episode had been "a frank conversation," that "people were glad" to see him "put in his place" and that if he wanted to bring this to the attention of the athletic administration "it will be your word against mine."
A current rower, who spoke to the Review on condition of anonymity, described what daily life on the team has become. "Quality of coaching is a different sphere of bad," he said. "The program is completely unorganized. The coaches don't know what they're doing. Sometimes people get no coaching for weeks." He described the team as operating on two tiers: the top boat athletes receive the coaches' attention and protection, and are given time off while sick or injured, while everyone else is left to fend for themselves. "If you're not in the 1V, you get pushed to the side and left to rot," he said. "Twenty hours a week of brutal training. Guys in the top boat are protected. Lower boats need to pester for weeks for a response."
He said the coaches attack athletes who speak up, and that meetings between coaches and rowers frequently end in tears. "Rowers are in tears in meetings with them. Coaches attack people's character. If you question anything, you're not bought in, and you don't care about anyone around you." Despite all of it, he said, the team stays together because of the athletes themselves. "It's love for the teammates and fundamental love for the sport. You put so much work into being here. Everyone is such good friends. Giving that up feels impossible. The coaches villainize anyone who leaves the team."
In April 2024, six rowers put their names to a detailed letter to the university laying out what they described as medical negligence and bullying; an investigation followed. The athletes said the inquiry concluded that the university could not find sufficient evidence of wrongdoing under the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, a finding they attribute to the narrowness of the investigation rather than the absence of a problem. They said investigators interviewed only a small group of rowers and that many of the athletes with the most direct concerns were never contacted. One athlete who was interviewed said he told the investigator he had been diagnosed with bulging discs and that he "would rather leave Stanford than row under those coaches." Athletes said no one followed up after the investigation closed, and that the conduct they had described continued.
Two years later, the athletes say, the stakes have only risen. In a recent meeting of rowers, one told the room he would rather kill himself than spend another year in the program.
"I am lucky enough to be in the position to leave the team and pay the school fees outright for the rest of my time here," Scott said. "This is not the case for many individuals currently on the team who I know feel an enormous amount of pressure to perform and sustain their ability to attend this school, despite feeling like the rowing program is failing them."
