In an athletic system founded upon and constructed around Pierre De Coubertin’s assertion of the Olympic Games as “the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism… with the applause of women as a reward,” female athletes are not only displaced, but, in many cases, set at an immediate and irrevocable disadvantage (qtd. in Schweinbnez 655). Though the participation of female athletes in Canadian sport has grown in prestige and recognition since the founding of the Games, protocols and training methodologies are failing these athletes, particularly in developmental stages. Popular culture rarely produces or acknowledges female athletics outside of a visually performative context – in disciplines such as ballet, figure skating, and gymnastics – and seldom within a Canadian context (Sandoz 1999), and “works of creative literature about sports other than hockey have largely been ignored” (Abdou 7). Exploring varsity rowing in a specifically Canadian context, my novel Spatial examines individual performance, team dynamic, the pressures placed on developing athletes and their coaches, the struggles of young university teams in a system not designed for their success, and the methods in which athletic institutions hinder female athletes’ ability to develop and remain engaged in Canadian sport. Despite a small upsurge in the representation of female athletes in contemporary American theatre and young adult literature, the genre of sports literature is still limited, not only by the variety of sports disciplines shown, but also in the way authors and creators approach these stories. Female protagonists in such works are presented as not only purveyors of a societally curated aesthetic, but as outliers as well; in their limited representation, the athletes are the chosen few deemed worthy of both attention and success in high performance sport. The only way to combat this perception is to inject more female sports narratives into the literary canon, making “[sport] more than just a background, [and rather] a dramatic engine for exploring socialization and self-image, femininity and power,” thereby legitimizing the experiences of female competitors, including those who are not Olympians (Vincentelli 2018).