ITHACA, N.Y. -- Heavyweight rowing captain Constantino Oberto Calleri lives by a rule that sounds simple until you try to follow it.

Every yes requires a hundred no's.

It's a philosophy his father shared years ago — one that Oberto Calleri carries into nearly every decision he makes.

If you want something badly enough, you protect it. You structure your life around it — saying yes to what matters most and accepting that everything else comes second.

"For every yes you say," he explained, "you have to protect it with a lot of no's. A lot of no's."

At Cornell, the yeses are easy to identify: Rowing. Academics. Family. Everything else fits somewhere after them.

It's a mindset that has shaped Oberto Calleri's path long before he ever grabbed an oar.

Sports had always been part of the family story.

Oberto Calleri grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind., the son of Argentine parents Marcelo and Valentina, but the family's roots stretched across continents. His grandparents were originally Italian immigrants, and his family still lives in Argentina in a town called Río Cuarto. Spanish was his first language. Trips to Córdoba province were frequent, reconnecting with cousins, aunts and uncles.

"We grew up in Indiana," he said, "but culturally we stayed very Argentine."

Sports were everywhere in that world.

His uncle, Agustín Calleri, was once ranked No. 16 in the world in tennis and competed in the Olympics. Another uncle, Fabricio Oberto, won an NBA title with the San Antonio Spurs and an Olympic gold medal for Argentina in 2004 while capturing bronze in 2008. José Meolans, an Olympic swimmer, is somewhere on the family tree, too.

Competition was part of the environment.

"My parents always had us playing sports," he said. "Everything."

Basketball, karate, boxing, soccer — all of it eventually gave way to tennis. The sport was part of the family fabric, and Oberto Calleri was good enough to pursue it seriously. By his early teens, he was training at IMG Academy in Florida alongside his brother, Maximo, surrounded by some of the best junior players in the world.

The experience sharpened his perspective quickly.

"In Indiana I was a big fish in a small pond," he said. "Then I got to Florida and realized how big the ocean was."

He improved, climbing into the top 20 juniors in Florida for his age group, but something about the sport never fully aligned with who he was.

You play tennis on an island, and Oberto Calleri realized he preferred something else.

"I'm a people person," he said. "I love working with people. I like building something together."

The sport that would eventually provide that feeling came almost by accident.

When Oberto Calleri transferred to Culver Military Academy in Indiana, he arrived midyear and needed a spring sport.

A rowing coach noticed his frame one evening and invited him to try the boathouse.

The first time he sat on a rowing machine, he didn't know what he was doing, Just that there was something to chase.

The erg room at Culver tracked everyone's times — thousands of meters reduced to a simple ranking. The test was a 2,000-meter row, the gold standard of suffering in the sport.

Oberto Calleri pulled a 7:20 - respectable for someone who had never rowed before, not especially remarkable.

The board also showed the times of athletes who had gone on to row at places like Stanford, Penn, Brown and Cornell.

"Seven-twenty," he remembers thinking. "I just have to get to six-twenty. That doesn't seem impossible."

The numbers began falling quickly. 7:20 became 6:45, then 6:40. They reflected thousands of repetitions, countless early mornings and a relentless attention to detail.

"You do the training, you get the result," he said.

The sport also forces a different kind of perspective. Eight athletes moving together, each stroke dependent on the others. In tennis, success was individual. In rowing, the boat only moves if everyone moves together.

"You might be having a great day," Oberto Calleri said, "but the guy behind you might not be."

Learning to adapt — to lead, adjust and sometimes sacrifice — became its own education.

The sport that started as a seasonal requirement soon became something else: a challenge worth chasing.

That chase eventually brought him to Cornell.

The first call from Todd Kennett, the Spirit of '57 Director of Rowing and Head Coach of Heavyweight Rowing at Cornell, didn't come in a quiet room or a scheduled window.

It came on a rifle range.

Oberto Calleri was helping train younger cadets at Culver, walking them through drills, when his phone lit up - it was the Cornell head coach..

Gunshots cracked in the background as he answered. Kennett paused.

"Is this a good time?"

Oberto Calleri didn't overthink it. He told him exactly where he was and what he was doing.

Kennett loved it. It was the kind of answer that told him everything he needed to know.

A few years later, Oberto Calleri is now one of the Big Red's fastest athletes, capable of pulling 6:02 in the Cornell Rowing Center for the same test that once felt foreign.

The distance between those numbers — 78 seconds — is the story of his life. The sport has a way of changing people who are willing to lean into it.

His teammates often describe him the same way: locked in.

"They know everything I do is thought about with rowing in mind," he said.

Rowing had already changed his trajectory. Italy is where it changed his life.

Constantino Oberto Calleri didn't know anyone when he arrived in Rome in March 2022.

He had found the rowing club the way you might find a restaurant in a new city — by calling around until someone answered.

The coach who picked up the phone happened to be an Olympic medalist.

"He picked up while he was coaching on the water," Oberto Calleri said with a laugh.

A few weeks later, Oberto Calleri stepped into the boathouse with a suitcase, a developing rowing career and a question that hung quietly in the background: where exactly was he going to live?

The answer came about 30 minutes later.

A teammate named Elio listened to the situation, shrugged and said the simplest thing in the world.

"Just stay with me."

Elio hadn't even asked his parents yet.

It worked out. Oberto Calleri spent the summer living with Elio's family in the center of Rome. The days were built around training sessions. The nights often ended with long walks through the city, past the Pantheon, through narrow streets that never seemed to empty, talking about rowing, school and whatever else came up.

Only then did the sport really, truly, take hold.

"That's when rowing really became my passion," Oberto Calleri said.

Until that summer, rowing had mostly been a path.

After Rome, it became something more personal.

He still returns every summer and now speaks fluent Italian, a connection that grew directly out of the friendships he built at the rowing club.

Recently, he tested with the Italian national team — another step that would have seemed impossible just a few years earlier.

"I feel like I owe something to rowing," he said, "because it gave me another life there."

At Cornell, the ILR School fuels another ambition: becoming a lawyer and a sports agent, advocating for athletes and helping them maximize the opportunities their talent creates.

"I love sports," he said. "I love helping athletes."

The ambition connects directly to the lessons he has absorbed through sports.

"If you really want something," he said, "you do what it takes."

For Oberto Calleri, that means protecting the priorities that matter most.

Saying yes to the right things – and building everything else around that decision.