Focus on your schoolwork for going to college; that is the most important thing you can do, and will have the most impact on your applications.
You’re 5’4" and you’ve never rowed before and you’re in 10th grade; you simply do not have a realistic pathway to be recruited as a rower. The odds would be similar to you starting basketball now and thinking you could become a recruited athlete as a power forward or center; no matter how much you may want it, you would not have the height and abilities required to excel in those roles.
Join crew for fun, exercise, and community, and focus on what you can pragmatically change to make your application stronger (your schoolwork) and direct your energies there if your goal is more highly selective/rejective colleges.
@blueberriesforsal is almost certainly correct - the pathway for you to leverage rowing as a recruiting tool is very unrealistic. While rowing generally starts later than other sports, spring of your sophomore year gives you less than a year to be competitive with other athletes interested in a “top school.”
That said, Dallas United Crew is a well-respected program, and there is no reason not to start out with their next Learn to Row program this Spring, both because rowing is a great sport to learn, and because some basic skills building will allow you to get early metrics. Unfortunately it looks like you missed one that started this past Monday. Call them and see what your options could be.
The good part is that rowing recruiting is very metrics-driven: the bad part mostly is that 5’4" and 132lbs isn’t a great set of metrics for either lightweight or openweight women’s rowing teams. That said, if you are strong as heck and can pull an excellent erg score after learning the basics in a Learn to Row class, it’s not impossible to overcome. It’s happened, though usually for athletes transitioning from another sport, most commonly Swimming.
I’ve seen that parents often think crew is a cheat code to elite school admissions - I can say with confidence that it is very much not that. Grades and test scores need to be in the admissible range, and even more, the athletes who do make that transition have generally been working for years at it, have built some combination of unbelievable strength and strong mechanics, and have a deep love for the sport (and the training expectations, which are beyond significant).
then like I won’t have any athletic component to my ec’s, would that be okay? I personally don’t want to go to Ivy Leagues, Im thinking UT Austin cause I’m in state, but I think I ruined my chances due to my grades.
should i lose weight to qualify for light weight like 110 lbs, because I’m too tall for coxswain? because my ec’s are projected to be like really good.
You don’t need to have athletic ECs to gain admission to any school in the country. Do what you are passionate about, show commitment, and do it to the best of your ability. Sports, music, theater, volunteering, art, whatever. Be YOU!
Echoing @Momofthree24: do things that you’re passionate about, do them as well as you can, and be you!
If you haven’t read it before, you might like this article, which — although from an admissions director at MIT, rather than UT Austin — is relevant to your overall questions: Applying Sideways
For a few very top ranked universities (Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford,…), ECs are how they decide among a long list of applicants with nearly perfect GPAs and glowing letters of reference. With as many B’s as A’s, aiming at a few very top ranked universities is not realistic.
For pretty nearly every other university, your grades will be the most important part of your application. ECs are way, way less important. You can get into very good universities with no ECs at all, or with the ECs that you are already doing.
Taking 4 AP classes as a sophomore in high school almost certainly suggests that you are jumping ahead way, way too quickly. Slow down. Stop taking so many AP classes.
There are a lot of very good universities in the US. You do not need to attend a “top 10” or even “top 50” university to do very well in life. MIT graduates routinely work alongside U.Mass and UNH graduates and in most cases and in most careers no one cares where anyone got their degree. You also do not need to attend a “top 50” university for your bachelor’s degree to get into a highly ranked graduate program. I either know or used to know a lot of people who got their bachelor’s degree at universities ranked anywhere in the 50 to 150 range who then attended very highly ranked graduate programs (including Ivy League and “top 10” graduate programs).
However, this is all getting ahead of ourselves. For now you need to back off to take high school classes that you are ready to take. You probably should talk to your guidance counselor. Depending upon how your parents feel about this and how you get along with your parents you might want to have your guidance counselor recommend to your parents that you slow down in terms of which classes you are taking.
My daughters started crew either at the age you are now or at an older age. However, they were built for it (tall, with strong legs).