The Ultimate Walk-On: Mike Herman

By Frank Fitzpatrick

Not surprisingly, at the moment his life changed, Mike Herman was in the gym.

A Navy SEAL aboard the USS Herschel Woody Williams in 2021, Herman liked to incorporate a long run into his job’s daily rigors. But on that morning, the lone treadmill in the ship’s gym was out of service.

“I went looking for something else and I noticed there was an erg. So I got on it,” Herman recalled. “One of the guys in my platoon had rowed, and I asked him for a couple of workouts. And I just went from there.”

As much as he liked the rowing-machine sessions, he wasn’t sure how to gauge his efforts. The platoon-mate, once a collegiate lightweight rower, suggested the best way might be to test himself with a 2K.

“I said, ‘OK, what’s your best 2K?’” Herman said. “And he was like, ‘It’s a 6:17, but you’re not going to beat that.’”

The provocation ignited Herman’s hyper-competitiveness. On his initial attempt, he pulled a 6:15. Before his deployment ended, he would, with his friend’s assistance, cut that time to 6:02.

“That led me to believe that maybe I could do this for real,” Herman said recently during a break from training in Colorado Springs. “And like anyone getting into something, when you realize you’re pretty good at it, you kind of think, ‘I wonder how far I can take this?’”

The answer, as it turns out, might be all the way to the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

Mission-oriented and resolute, Herman, a native of a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., has undergone a remarkably rapid transformation. At 29, he’d never been in a rowing shell. At 33, he’s an Olympic-caliber oarsman.

Herman’s sudden leap to prominence, just four years after he discovered the sport, helped the U.S. men’s eight pull off a coup of its own at last summer’s World Rowing Championships in Shanghai. A year after the Paris Olympics, in what typically is a transition year for American rowers, the U.S. crew surprised almost everyone by capturing a bronze medal. With Herman in three-seat, the U.S. finished 2.42 seconds behind a powerful Netherlands boat and just a breath (.16 of a second) after runner-up Great Britain.

A few weeks before, Herman had been part of a mixed-eight crew that won at the World Rowing Cup II Varese. At that same event, he also competed in the men’s double sculls, finishing 15th.

“I never thought he’d get this far and I told him as much,” said Bill Manning, who mentored Herman at Philadelphia’s Penn AC. “I said, ‘You’re 30, and I’d hate for you to spend time doing something that’s not productive. It was highly unlikely he’d ever make a senior national team. Well, he proved me wrong.”

Herman’s steely eyes are now focused on 2028, when he hopes to win a spot in the men’s eight that will go for America’s first Olympic gold in the event since 2004. If he succeeds, those who helped him develop won’t be surprised.

“The reason he’s been so successful so quickly is that he’s so incredibly persistent. He’s a tenacious SOB when it comes to going after something he wants,” Manning said. “He was a Navy SEAL, and for those kinds of people, that’s probably a common quality. Elsewhere, it’s pretty unusual.”

Herman grew up in Bethesda, Md. He wrestled and played lacrosse at The Heights School. But at the University of San Diego, he didn’t compete in a single sport.

“I was in Navy ROTC,” he said, “and that pretty much took up all my time.”

After graduation, Herman—6-foot-3, 215 pounds—was commissioned in the Navy, where his appetite for physical activity was whet by the intense SEAL training and enhanced by his belated embrace of rowing. Ending his eight-year Navy career as a lieutenant in 2022, Herman went looking for assistance, reaching out to coaches he found on USRowing’s website.

“A lot of them didn’t reply, said they didn’t take novices, or they no longer had a high-performance program,” he said. “But I was able to get in touch with Bill at Penn AC. He was just starting to platform his program there and he said I should come to Philly.”

Used to uprooting every two years in the Navy, Herman had no difficulty abandoning Virginia Beach and heading north. He found a place to live, got a job selling software to the Department of Defense, and began training with Manning.

“He’s not like most of these national-team wannabes,” Manning said. “He didn’t row at some elite prep school or brand-name Ivy college. He was willing to relocate his life, move out of the home he owned, come to Philadelphia, find a roommate, find a job, and devote himself to making the team. Most people are like, ‘Well, I want to make the team but I have this relationship I can’t leave.’ Or ‘I have to keep this job or live in this town.’ It doesn’t work. Mike threw caution to the wind and said, ‘I’m going to go after this.’ That’s rare.”

The veteran coach initially stuck the almost 30-year-old novice in a U23 camp. All of  Herman’s crewmates were several years younger, most were just as inexperienced.

Before long, Manning realized that the eager ex-SEAL’s ambition required more personal schooling then his busy schedule would permit. So he directed him to Dan Beery, a member of the U.S. eight that won gold at the Athens Games.

Herman moved in with Beery, and at 6 a.m. each morning, the two were out on the upper Schuylkill, a tranquil stretch of the river near Norristown.

His new roommate’s potential was obvious and, wanting to ensure that it flowered, Beery drew on lessons from his old mentor, legendary coach Ted Nash. Nash, who died in 2021, had been a participant or coach at every Olympics from 1960 through 2008.

“I knew what Ted looked for. And Mike checked a lot of those boxes,” Beery said. “We did some of Ted’s rhythm-comp workouts that go all the way back to the Boys in the Boat. Mike really wanted to do those old workouts. Those Boys in the Boat guys won a gold medal at the 1936 Olympics for a reason. They trained like beasts. Their boats were 50 pounds heavier and they used wooden oars. Ted picked up those workouts when he went out to Washington and trained with Stan Pocock [the legendary boatbuilder and coach]. And Mike just attacked them like a beast.”

At one point, Herman asked Beery to run him through a training exercise that perhaps only a SEAL would request. To simulate racing speeds without fatigue, a rope from the launch is attached to a rowing shell. Unless the launch creates a perfect V-shaped wake, the rower is in danger of capsizing, or worse.

“The possibility of injury is great,” Beery said. “You’ve got to create that perfect V. And if the rope’s not perfect, it twists the boat, and you can catch a crab and flip over. But Mike is so strong, he was able to do it. You should really do it only with someone who’s done it before. Or a Navy SEAL.”

Herman tends to be reticent and self-effacing, adhering to the tenet in the Navy SEAL Code that says “I do not advertise the nature of my work.”

“He’s been through some stuff, but he would talk about it only vaguely and indirectly,” Beery said. “I never tried to dig into it. About the most he’ll ever say is ‘I enjoyed the training.’”

Whatever the experiences, they helped Herman deal with the nerves rowers–especially novice rowers–face in competition, his coaches say.

Gradually, as Herman’s abilities were refined, he was entered in races that Manning termed “the very bottom rung on the ladder”—C and D events at the Independence Day Regatta, Canadian Henley, the club nationals. Still, he kept improving, and practicing more intensely.

“Another athlete came up to me and said, ‘Bill, Mike’s lips are turning blue,’” Manning said. “And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what happens when you’re pulling really stinking hard.’ He has that ability to put himself at a level of physical discomfort a vast majority of people would not do.”

Early on, Herman was a single sculler almost exclusively. He sought every racing opportunity he could find, frequently finishing at the bottom of those C and D finals. But he progressed rapidly, and that improvement caught the eyes of USRowing officials. In late 2024, Herman was invited to the National Training Center in Sarasota. He’s made his home there ever since.

There, the ex-SEAL’s self-confidence and determination have enabled him to overcome his inexperience as well as any unease he might have felt in the company of the nation’s top rowers, said Casey Galvanek, USRowing’s head men’s coach.

“He’s flexible and willing to do what it takes to get it right,”  Galvanek said. “He asks questions. He’s willing to make changes. He came down here thinking, ‘I need to work on these things to make my stroke better.’ He figures it out. That’s a huge positive. A lot of people are waiting for the coaches to do things for them.”

Until the serious international season begins this summer, Herman will shuttle between Sarasota and Colorado Springs. Working out in the high-altitude Rockies increases red-blood cell counts and helps rowers utilize oxygen more efficiently when they return to sea level.

“We send them to altitude two or three times a year,” Galvanek said. “Right now, we’ve got 32 people there and 20 here in Sarasota.”

In Sarasota, the long days typically include two sessions on the water, plus weight training, boat maintenance, meetings, nutrition lessons—a schedule one of Herman’s companions called “an off day for a SEAL.”

At some point, the 50-plus rowers will be culled and the national teams selected. Right now, a spot on the eight looks like Herman’s primary target.

“My first time ever in an eight was in January 2025,” he said. “I’d been primarily sculling. But at our training camp, there were eight sweepers—four ports, three starboards, and me. So they were like, ‘OK, you’re a starboard now.’ I started sweeping a little more and was in the eight for most of camp.”

Herman occupied the three-seat when that boat took third at Shanghai. And that spot was fine with him.

“I wasn’t in any position to argue,” he said. “When we were preparing for worlds, we heard from a gentleman, Stan Cwiklinski, who’d been on the 1964 Tokyo gold-medal winners. He was the three-seat in that boat. He said his coach told him the three was the seat with the least responsibility. I told him that was OK. I didn’t mind at all.”       

Frank Fitzpatrick, a longtime sportswriter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, was a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. He covered nine Olympics, including the 2004 Games in Athens when the U.S. men’s eight ended a 40-year drought by winning a gold medal.

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