It Takes Crew (to Make a Thing Go Right)

There’s a magic to rowing that’s hard to imagine unless you’ve felt a crew boat lift and float on top of the water as eight rowers pull in precise harmony. Watching over all those ripples and micromovements is a magician of sorts—the coxswain.

“A lot of it comes down to trusting your instincts,” says Morgan Foster, who helped steer her team to the NCAA Championship at Brown University in 1999. “When everyone’s rowing together and the oars are catching at the exact same time … that’s the most addicting thing about the sport.”

If the rowers are the muscle of the boat, the compact coxswain is the brains, studying and guiding the other eight rowers to a flow state, as Foster describes it.

She learned that feeling on crew boats at Brown and St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware, where they won the Henley Royal Regatta in England in 1997. But it’s a way of life she carried with her through two decades as a family law attorney, her own divorce, and her newest chapter as an entrepreneur and founder of The Pivot Process, where she specializes in divorce mediation and education.

In both mediation and rowing, Foster says, you have to know how to read the room to understand what motivates each person. “You’re trying to take disparate parties and have them work together in a unified way.”

From her years as a partner and head of the family law practice at McAllister, DeTar, Showalter & Walker on the Eastern Shore, working primarily on complex family law litigation cases, she saw how damaging the litigation process can be for families. “Even if you have all the money in the world, even if everything goes your way, you are never going to be able to get the best outcome in a family law scenario in a litigation context,” she says.

In litigation, she says, there’s so much out of families’ control—primarily time. “And I can’t make it go faster,” Foster says. Clients often stay in unresolved conflict for years. “That’s not a knock on our judicial system. Courts are doing everything they can to try to unclog the docket, and most judges are totally buried.”

The solution, she’s found, is mediation. When Foster went through her own divorce, she and her ex-husband decided to negotiate everything directly over weeks rather than spend years in and out of court. That gave them both space to start the healing process and redefine their relationship as co-parents of two boys.

“We’ve been divorced for 2 ½ years, and I still consider him my best friend,” she says. “We have a really great relationship, and it just has been such a positive thing for our kids.”

Foster wrote about her experience on her blog Divorcing Gracefully, an outlet that helps others navigate their divorces without litigation and inspired The Pivot Process—Foster’s step-by-step course for holistic divorce. She also has courses about coparenting, communication during high-conflict divorce, prenups and more.

“I just decided I had to make a really bold and somewhat terrifying move to leave the traditional law practice behind and go all in on this new concept,” she says, adding that its many digital offerings also include an app called Second Thought.

Her litigation clients will still have a home at Rice Law in Annapolis, where Foster serves as of counsel, but in this new phase, she’ll focus primarily on mediation and the educational video series all about divorce.

With mediation, she can work with only a limited number of clients at a time, but her videos are a way to reach a broader audience so more people can “have control over their own future and their family’s future,” she says.

Foster is clear-eyed about her mission, prioritizing people over brute force and actualizing every step in the same methodical way she steered many crew teams to victory. You can feel it, she says, when everything is moving the way it should.

Talk Like a Coxswain

Common phrases you may hear yelled at a team of rowers

• Weigh enough: Stop rowing. Often sounds like “waynuff”
• Hard on port/starboard: Row with more power on left/right
• Hold water: Drag oar blades to slow or stop the boat
• Back it down: Row backward
• Power 10: Ten consecutive strokes to try to move up