SportsZone: Ross Lee

While Ross Lee has certainly stayed busy this fall as a member of Penn Charter’s PAISAA-winning cross country team, his connection to his other sport of crew goes much deeper than championship trophies and personal-best times.

Ross, a PC senior, was honored in September as one of two recipients of the John & Parthenia Izzard Athleticism, Service and Achievement Award, along with a female rower from Springside Chestnut Hill Academy. John Izzard Jr., who passed away in 2022, was one of the first Black members of the Philadelphia rowing community in the 1970s and was equally devoted to serving as a mentor and educator to countless youths.

For Ross, receiving the Izzard Award was the culmination of many years of service both inside and outside the Penn Charter community. While all PC students perform service projects and activities during their time at the school, Ross has taken it several steps further, as service — specifically projects geared toward environmentalism and conservation — has become his life’s true calling.

“When I heard I was selected for the award, it was such an amazing honor,” Ross recounted. “I come from a pretty small PC rowing program, so it’s amazing that the selection committee felt I represented some of the same values as Mr. Izzard, a highly-involved Renaissance man. 

“He was described by people as super loving and someone who was always there for you not waiting to be asked. Any work he saw, he would do it. I’m someone who can be very hard on himself, so it was a formative reminder that I was on the right track. It’s very humbling to not only represent PC, but also my family and community.”

Like many people during the Covid-19 pandemic, Ross discovered some new life interests essentially by accident. With Philadelphia mostly shut down, Ross and his family left their home in the city’s Fairmount neighborhood to breathe some fresh air at his grandparents’ country home in State College. While bored and wandering around their basement one day, Lee came upon his grandfather’s old fly fishing gear that was, by his account, “collecting dust in a corner.”

Even with his grandfather being an avid outdoorsman, Ross said he wasn’t raised as a hunting or fishing enthusiast. Now, with nothing to do, he found himself surrounded by miles of trout streams, so Ross gathered the gear, threw on his waders and ventured out into State College to find a spot.

“I fell in love with fly fishing,” Ross said. “It took me about a month of practice before I hooked a trout on the fly. By the time we left, I was hooked.”

Ross tends to go all-in with his interests, so it wasn’t enough just to try to catch fish. He wanted to learn more about their habitats in need of protection and coldwater conservation in general. This led to Ross applying for a weeklong immersive conservation fly fishing youth camp in Grantham, Cumberland County, during the summer before his junior year as part of PC’s Environmental Certificate Program.

When he got back to East Falls for the fall trimester, Ross and a PC friend started a Naturalist Club at the school, and he also accepted a leadership position in Penn Charter’s Green Club. The Certificate Program allowed Ross to combine his interests with the PC curriculum, taking courses like English and the Environment and Quakerism and the Environment. 

He performed other service projects both inside and outside PC in areas such as homelessness, food insecurity and environmental cleanup. Before long, he connected deeply with Alyson Goodner OPC '96, director of the Center of Public Purpose, who helped Ross understand and nurture his interest in both service and the environment. Goodner also wrote Ross’s letter of recommendation for the Izzard Award, in which she referred to Lee as “one of the new servant leaders in our community that would consistently center the environment on our campus and in the wider community.”

“Stewardship is a testimony,” Ross said. “The people are the most important to me; not just the faculty, but finding other students passionate in the field was huge for me. I found my people. I struggled at first with the PC social scene, but through an environmental lens I got involved with upperclassmen through the certificate program. There were already people who were meaningfully engaged, so I didn’t have to break down any walls.”

Getting involved with the PC crew program was one of Ross’s last meaningful steps into fully settling into his present identity. He didn’t grow up on the water, but his home’s close access to the Schuylkill River Trail allowed Lee to gaze at the sculls and rowers off Boathouse Row while running or biking along the river. He also read “The Boys in the Boat,” a 2013 nonfiction novel by Daniel James Brown that chronicled the University of Washington rowing team’s experiences at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. All of this, plus the fact that people told him his 6-foot-6 frame would be perfect for rowing, led Lee to try out for the PC team the spring of his sophomore year.

“It’s an arduous sport, and very little that you do beforehand can prepare you for it,” Ross said. “I fell in love with it despite the initial challenges that made me unsuccessful at first.”

He joined the Fairmount Rowing Association club team so that he could get more practice out of season, and by the time his junior season arrived Ross completely immersed himself in the sport. He became much more confident in his skills and abilities on the river, and the sport’s deep connection to water and nature only compounded Ross’s interest moving forward.

“Being on the water from the perspective of a rowing shell is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” Ross said. 

Last summer, Ross participated in two more impactful and rewarding social experiences. In June, he spent two weeks in Buenos Aires as part of an immersive linguistic cultural exchange program betweem PC and Jewish day school Martin Buber. He lived with a host family that allowed him to see politically engaged young people in a different part of the world. Lee also hosted two Argentinian students at his home during junior year.

After he got back from Buenos Aires, Ross traveled with Goodner and a PC contingent through the Center for Public Purpose to Washington, D.C. to learn about lobbying through the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Quaker organization that lobbies Congress on issues related to promoting peace, justice and environmental stewardship. Lee received firsthand experience on lobbying for important social issues such as gun violence/control, and he was struck at how receptive the Washington lawmakers were to his and his fellow students’ ideas and stories.

“It was an informative trip, the first time I was really participating in our democracy,” Ross said. “I thought our ideas would be received as, ‘We’ve heard this before from more qualified people.’ What I found was the opposite: the Congress people and their staffs all cared about what we had to say, and that was super inspiring. It was an easy transition bringing my passion for service and the environment and applying it to a different issue.”

All of this has led Ross to believe that he can truly make a difference in the world and impact the lives of others through service and stewardship once his time at Penn Charter is up in a few months. He is looking at colleges where he could study environmental science and possibly walk on to the rowing team, but he’s also looking at other schools that offer other programs that would further fuel his love of nature.

“One aspect I don’t take for granted is I want to work with people,” Ross said. “My favorite aspect of the environmental clubs at PC is the people I’ve met along the way. I don’t want to lose that. It gives me motivation to be surrounded by people with similar interests and priorities. 

“Everyone should do that. It’s essential to surround yourself with likeminded people who care about what you care about. PC has let me do that. I’ve surrounded myself with people who care about conservation, which is not an opportunity all high school students in this country would have.”

– Ed Morrone OPC ’04