GUILDERLAND — Meghan Gutknecht doesn’t give up.

Last week, she was standing in the Brazilian sunshine with a bronze medal hanging from a ribbon around her neck.

She and her three teammates, in quadruple sculls, came in third in the World Rowing Junior Championships in Rio de Janiero. They stood on the podium, holding bouquets of bright flowers, with the American flag stretched in front of them.

Meghan worked hard to get there. Last summer, she went to a competitive rowing camp but didn’t make the junior national team.

To qualify for a rowing camp, Meghan explained, you take a 2,000-meter erg test. The ergometer is a rowing machine that measures an athlete’s force.

“If they think you have a chance, you go to selection camp,” she said. At summer camp, rowers try out for boats. “The selection lasts three weeks, then there’s training all summer,” said Meghan.

“I was bummed,” she said, because she hadn’t made the cut for the top team last summer.

But her coach at the Albany Rowing Center where she trains on the Hudson River offered her a chance to compete on her own, and she took it.

She rowed in the Canadian Henley, an annual international competition, modeled after the granddaddy of all crew regattas — the Henley Royal Regatta, on the Thames in England. The Canadian Henley is a bit shorter at the standard 2,000 meters.

“My coach offered me to come along,” said Meghan.

She describes her coach, Michael MacMinn, as “really supportive.”

“He saw potential in me,” she said. “He did extra practices with me...He’s an awesome coach.”

She had never competed in single sculls — a shell where a rower, alone, uses two oars, one in each hand.  “Mike would take me out on morning practices,” she said of MacMinn. “I never did large-scale competition.”

She began crew as a seventh-grader, rowing with one oar. “I started sculling to even out my body and ended up liking it. It clicked,” she said.

The sport clicked, too. Meghan used to play soccer and started rowing at the urging of a friend whose sister rowed.

She began rowing with SGS, which stands for Schenectady, Guilderland, Scotia. “I liked it as a social thing, meeting people from different schools,” Meghan recalled.

By the ninth grade, she was competitive in the sport.

“I really like that you get what you put in,” she said. “You don’t have to be the strongest person. Technique matters. I love the mindset.

She described crew as ultimately a team sport. “You’re in the boat with either eight or three people...You have to row in synch and time in the same mindset in the exact same way.”

She entered the Canadian Henley last summer in the under-19 class and came away with the win — first place in an international competition.

“It was a really close final. I pulled away at the last second,” she said.

It was the first time she developed a race plan and followed it.

“It was a nice way to end the summer,” Meghan modestly concluded.

Making the national team

This summer, after graduating from Guilderland High School, Meghan went to camp in Connecticut and made it to the junior national team.

She was in a boat with Emily Kallfelz from Rhode Island, and Elizabeth Sharis and Emily Delleman, both from Iowa. “We got very close,” she said. “We were living in a house together,” she said, as well as practicing and rowing together.

One of her crew is going to Princeton, and another to Stanford; the third has a year left of high school.

Meghan chose the University of Michigan. “I really looked for a big school and a team with good results,” she said. “The Big Ten schools are good at rowing, and the Ivies.”

The University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor, is in the Big Ten conference, and has about 37,000 students.

“I just fell in love with it — the coaching staff the team,” she said.

She is good at science and math and thinks she may major in environmental science. She likes the outdoors — painting landscapes in watercolors and hiking “anywhere I can,” sometimes in the Adirondacks with friends, and often going for walks in the nearby Plotter Kill Preserve.

She adores her two dogs, Bella and Watson; both are Cavapoos, a cross between Cavalier King Charles spaniels and poodles.

“I like hanging out with them. That’s one of the hardest things when I go away to school,” she said of missing her dogs. She’s glad the Michigan coaching staff has dogs.

Winning bronze

Meghan traveled to Rio de Janiero with her team. Her parents made the trip to Brazil, too, but she didn’t stay with them. “They want us to focus on rowing,” she said.

She credits her parents for their unwavering support. Brian and Julie Gutknecht aren’t athletic, but their kids are. “We’re always joking about it,” said Meghan. Both of her brothers — Josh, who will be a junior at Guilderland, and Kevin, who is going into seventh grade — play lacrosse, and have also played football and baseball.

The Gutknechts are always there to root for their kids — even on another continent.

The World Rowing Junior Championships in Rio de Janiero lasted for two weeks, with races on the last two days.

Meghan and her teammates stayed in a hotel with 12 other teams. “There were kids from around the world,” she said. She likes traveling and has competed in Spain, too. “It’s really exciting, really cool to go somewhere else, to get to see other parts of the world,” she said.

In Brazil, she said, “We went to the course every day, practicing,” she said. It is the same course that will be used next August for the Olympics. The Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon is connected to the Atlantic Ocean.

“It was beautiful,” said Meghan.

Before the race, Meghan said, “I was really nervous. The three other girls had been to Junior Worlds.”

A complicating factor was that a number of athletes got sick and one of them was on Meghan’s team. “She got sick the morning of our heats. We just qualified,” said Meghan. “She bounced back the next day and we had a really good semi-final.”

Going into the final, Meghan said, “We had a race plan. We knew Germany was fast. We knew Britain had beaten us in both races beforehand. Our plan was to stay as close as we could to them, and to make a move if we could.”

Once on the course, she said, “It was clear who was going to win.” Germany was ahead from the start. “It spread out fast,” Meghan said of the six boats in the final race.

Her boat attempted to catch the British boat but Great Britain kept ahead. The three shells finished within six seconds of each other. Germany finished in 6:46.87, followed by Great Britain in 6:50.31, and the United States in 6:52.58.

“It was very exciting,” said Meghan. “You’ve been training all summer and you finally get what you’ve been training for.”

The training consists of workouts twice a day, six or seven times a week. “You’re rowing in the morning and afternoon,” she said, and also weightlifting and “working on technical things.”

She starts at the University of Michigan on Sept. 2 and, now that she has finished with her Junior National team practices is starting on the suggested plan she was given by the Michigan coach.

“I’m taking it one summer at a time,” she said of her goals for rowing.