10 WAYS TO SAVE ROWING
James Dietz Hydrow Athlete
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FEATURES
The Day
the Demons Flinched
Beating the Coast Guard Academy seemed impossible, but steeled by a tough coach, the Wesleyan crew became capable of poise under pressure and supreme do-or-die effort.
BY TOM MATLACK
10 Ways to Save Rowing
We may be in good shape today, but what about tomorrow?
BY CHIP DAVIS
Jean-Christophe Rolland Interview
The president of World Rowing on the state of the sport on the elite international level.
BY CHIP DAVIS
DEPARTMENTS
25 QUICK CATCHES
News The first SEC championship
Anita DeFrantz to the Olympic Hall of Fame
$7.5 million Caspersen upgrade
Vesper hires new coaches
57 TRAINING
Sports Science Principles of Periodization
Coxing Coxing Your Way to Dream U.
Recruiting Start Early—and Follow the Rules
Fuel Hydration and Electrolytes
Training Stepping Up Your Fitness
Coach Development Keep, Cut, or Rethink? 14 From the Editor 66 Doctor Rowing
CHIP DAVIS
The Path to Success
As the president of World Rowing, Jean-Christophe Rolland might have the toughest job in rowing. Fortunately, he’s an Olympic-champion oarsman, so he has the grit, determination, and resilience to endure discomfort, to work cooperatively, and to keep going when others quit.
The affable Frenchman, frustrated and infuriated—as he says in the Rowing News interview beginning on page 46—by the failure of most national teams to support the World Rowing Cup by showing up and racing, has managed to keep rowing’s place in the Olympic Games through his work on the International Olympic Committee.
Old World thinking at its worst, since a proper Olympic regatta could be held at Benderson Park.
Unfortunately, that “go along to get along” approach has cost lightweight rowing’s place in the Olympics as well as undermining the integrity of Olympic rowing by shortening the race distance to 1,500 meters for the LA 2028 Games.
Because so much work went into arriving at that bad decision, Rolland says, the decision must stand. That’s Old World thinking at its worst, especially since a proper Olympic regatta could be held on the purpose-built world-class venue at Nathan Benderson Park in Sarasota (just as the LA 2028 whitewater canoe and kayak events will be held in Oklahoma City, and the Paris Games surfing events were held in Tahiti).
As reported throughout this issue, rowing is thriving and more popular than ever, just not at the international elite level. But as I write on pages 40-43, our sport faces a big challenge— the coming “demographic cliff.” The good news is that on both the Olympic and domestic levels, there are solutions. I offer 10 of them, including “row-up music” and crews picking their own lanes before the start, to make our sport even better.
These potential improvements build on what is already a great sport. Tom Matlack’s exciting recollection of the journey that his Wesleyan crew took to victory in 1986 tells the story of what rowing has to offer all of us: Hard work and working together lead to success.
LETTERS
Preserve the Essence
“Change For The Better?” by Doctor Rowing/Andy Anderson in the May edition of Rowing News was another great and thought-provoking article.
It’s certainly positive news that World Rowing has equal representation in both men’s and women’s events—as most championships do today—and that Henley Royal Regatta is closer to achieving equity. Only five more events to go, stewards! What has proven to benefit men for so many decades now is benefiting women as well, almost throughout our sport.
One has to ask, however, what is it about rowing that makes it so special? And as Doctor Rowing inquired, “Will the [future] changes open up rowing so that it remains relevant and compelling on the world’s biggest stage?”
Rowing is a high-performance sport requiring hours of training to perfect not only the physiological ability to race at such a high intensity but also the technique equally necessary for success. I have always thought that the thing that binds rowers in such a close fraternity is the shared ability by all athletes to endure not only the training but also what is arguably the most difficult test in all of sport: 2,000-meter racing.
What I fear is that the shortened 1,500-meter racecourse at the coming 2028 LA Olympics will become a precedent for the future of our sport. Nothing in sport is as demanding as 2,000 meters. The moment in the race when the physical body is spent and the mental strength of the athlete is asked to push through to the finish is the essence of rowing—mastering the limits of mind and body! Will that be lost?
The 2,000-meter race distance is also a link to our past, enabling us to compare how we stand against those who’ve come before.
I agree with the good Doctor Rowing that we are “a niche sport, and an excellent one.” Beach Sprints might be entertaining on some level and might even make us “more relevant,” but will it still teach our athletes the values and lessons that rowing offers currently as a strength-endurance sport?
I applaud Mike Teti’s suggestion of the mixed eight. What took World Rowing so long to realize that this is a great idea?
Katie Ledecky and Michael Phelps won the hearts of the world’s TV audience racing as individuals, and added to those victories racing in relay events. Today, Maher Drysdale, Oli Zeidler, Emma Twigg, and the Sinkovic brothers are big-name athletes recognized internationally, inside and outside rowing.
Yet in the U.S., at our antiquated collegiate championships, rowers still are racing mostly in eights and fours. If the stewards of Henley can make impactful change after a century, there’s hope that the IRA and NCAA can as well. We are not producing any heroes!
We are an Olympic sport and should include all the Olympic events in our collegiate championships, as swimming and track and field do. The U.S. has the largest TV audience in the world. Give people rowers with great stories to cheer for, and the viewership will come.
If World Rowing wants to make rowing more attractive, the way to do so is not by changing the distance or running up beaches. The Tour de France and Boston Marathon prove that traditional events can be entertaining and relevant—if produced properly.
Rowing has been an Olympic sport since the very first Games. Don’t mess with the true essence of rowing!
Jim Dietz Centerville, Mass.
(Dietz was an Olympic sculler in 1972, 1976, and 1980 and an Olympic coach in 1988, 1992, and 2000.)
Virginia’s One-Two Punch
At the 2025 American Collegiate Rowing Association Championships, May 18, on Melton Lake in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the University of Virginia’s men’s first and second eights both won their grand finals at the collegiate club rowing national championships.
Vanderbilt won the women’s first eight, and Bowdoin won the women’s second eight
“It was a great weekend,” said Virginia coach Frank Biller, “a lot of fun.”
That fun included coaches from competing schools gathering before dawn each morning of the three-day regatta to pull logs and other debris washed onto the course by heavy rains.
“We just do that,” said Biller of the camaraderie among club coaches, whose programs are not funded by their universities’ athletic departments. “It’s not even a question that we would do that for each other.”
PHOTO: KARL CHENG
Crimson Tide
Harvard lightweights swept the top three eights and the four at the 2025 Eastern Sprints, May 18, on Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester, Mass., winning every event in which they entered. (Harvard did not have an entry in the fourth varsity lightweight eight.)
Harvard’s heavyweights also won the top three varsity eights, marking the first time since 2014 the Crimson heavyweights have won the Eastern Sprints. Harvard finished second in the heavyweight four and fourth varsity eight (by less than a second to Yale) and didn’t have an entry in the fifth varsity eight.
PHOTO: KARL CHENG
Stanford Sweeps ACC Rowing Championship
Stanford swept all five grand finals at its first Atlantic Coast Conference Rowing Championship on Saturday, May 17, at Lake Hartwell, S.C.
The Cardinal set championship records in every event at the 25th ACC regatta. Stanford’s first varsity eight became the first in ACC championship history to break six minutes (5:58.6), and Stanford’s varsity four became the first to break seven minutes (6:53.2).
Stanford won the championship with 132 points, followed by Virginia (106), Syracuse (104), California (102), Duke (89), North Carolina (68), Clemson (67), SMU (50), Notre Dame (50), Louisville (39), Miami (34), and Boston College (17).
The Cardinal also swept the ACC annual awards. Stanford’s varsity eight won Crew of the Year, Derek Byrnes was named ACC Coach of the Year, and varsity rower Sarah Marriott earned ACC Newcomer of the Year honors.
PHOTO COURTESY STANFORD ATHLETICS
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Texas Rows Into History as SEC’s First Conference Champions
When the SEC sponsored rowing last August, it meant that two highachieving teams—Texas and Tennessee—would have the chance to compete in a storied conference.
Confetti streamers draped around Texas rowers at Melton Lake in Oak Ridge, Tenn., on Saturday, May 10, as the Longhorns became SEC rowing champions and the conference’s 22nd official sport concluded its first title event, a regatta dominated by Texas and Tennessee.
After near-identical point splits heading into the final race, a closing effort by the Longhorn women pushed them to a threesecond win in the finale.
Tennessee led for the first 1,000 meters, but Texas surged three-quarters of the way through, which was enough to claim the SEC’s inaugural trophy.
“I was like, ‘OK, this is the way it should be,’” Texas head coach Dave O’Neill said after the intense finale.
It was a day filled with competitive pushes from two of the top programs in the country.
Texas entered the championship as defending NCAA Division I national champions, while the Lady Vols were thirdplace finishers last season. When the SEC sponsored rowing officially last August, it meant that two high-achieving programs would have the chance to compete in a storied conference.
With the addition of the SEC Championship,
Boat Race Draws Record Viewership
A peak audience of 2.82 million people watched the BBC coverage of The Boat Race in April. A peak audience of 2.18 million watched the Women’s Boat Race, a 14-percent leap in viewership over 2024, making it the most-watched female sporting event in the United Kingdom. In the 79th Women’s Boat Race – and on the 10th anniversary of the Women’s Boat Race first taking place on the Tideway – Cambridge beat Oxford by 2.5 lengths in a time of 19:25 after a dramatic clash of oars resulted in a restart early on. This represented the first stop and restart ever seen in the Women’s Boat Race.
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all of the “Power Four” athletic conferences—SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, and ACC—which generate the most football and basketball TV revenue and have the greatest sway over the NCAA, now feature women’s rowing championships. Earlier this spring, University of Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte announced plans to increase the number of scholarships Texas offers in rowing to 68, up from 20.
“It’s been awesome to have the SEC take us under their wing,” Tennessee head coach Kim Cupini said. “Texas—always an amazing crew, obviously defending national champions—and we’ve been ranked in the top four or five all year. That was an unreal event and a great race experience.”
Alabama and Oklahoma also competed in the event, but neither school was able to claim gold in a race. The Crimson Tide placed third with 35 points, while the Sooners took fourth with 34 points.
“I was like, ‘OK, this is the way it should be.’”
—Texas coach Dave O’Neill
“Though there are only four teams, this is probably the most competitive conference there is right now,” O’Neill said. “I knew this was going to be a battle because the competition is super fierce.
“This is probably going to be the tightest racing of any conference championship out there, so I’m certainly happy to pull out the win.”
Tennessee opened the day with two quick wins, taking the third varsity four and the third varsity eight races. It put the Lady Vols ahead by three points in the early stages.
Texas did not back down, however. The Longhorns triumphed in the next two races to take the lead. After falling behind early, O’Neill’s crew realized there were still plenty of races left.
“We talked about how the most important race, the most important race of
the regatta, is the race you’re in,” O’Neill said.
With an even split in races won and a tight margin in points, the final two races of the day were crucial. Tennessee prevailed in the second varsity eight to narrow the gap between first and second place to four points so that the final first varsity eight race would determine the overall winner.
When that contest ended, Texas claimed its third—and most important— win of the day.
The tight race epitomized the fierce competition between two conference foes.
“There’s definitely been a rivalry brewing,” Cupini said, “so to have a good showdown here is awesome.”
“Being Texas, we know that everyone’s out to get us,” O’Neill said. “Tennessee has a good program, and it’s great to bring out the best in each other.”
As college athletics changes dramatically, rowing is thriving. The SEC’s decision to sponsor the sport was a major boost, and so far the emergence of NIL (name, image, and likeness) payments to athletes and the attendant disruption have not impacted rowing as much as other sports.
“The NIL stuff hasn’t really affected us,” O’Neill said. “It’s still about the kids and loving being on the team. They’re here for all the right reasons.”
For Tennessee, the transfer portal has contributed to Cupini’s early success. After leaving SMU for the Lady Vols in 2023, Cupini lured many of her former athletes to Knoxville.
“We talk a lot about our strengths and weaknesses as a team and know we have to look out for Texas,” Cupini said. “We prepare for that and have some strong women with a strong desire to make Tennessee proud.”
Because the Melton Lake racecourse is only 40 minutes from the University of Tennessee, plenty of students, local spectators, and fans from all four competing schools attended.
“The venue rocked it,” Cupini said. “Tennessee always rocks it at home. To have such fans and then see the fans from the other schools as well was really cool. Hats off to the SEC! They did an amazing job.”
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DeFrantz Enters Olympic Hall of Fame
The first Black woman to win an Olympic medal in rowing, she was the first African American and the first woman to serve on the International Olympic Committee.
Olympic rower and leader Anita DeFrantz will be inducted into the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Hall of Fame as a member of the class of 2025 on July 12 in Colorado Springs.
DeFrantz made history as the first Black woman to win an Olympic medal in rowing, capturing bronze in the women’s eight at the 1976 Montreal Games, the first time the event was contested at the Olympics.
In 1984, DeFrantz was vice president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, which oversaw one of the most successful Games in Olympic history. She was elected to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1986, becoming the first African American and woman to serve on the committee. In 1997, she became the first woman elected to a four-year term as IOC vice president, a position she held until 2001 and resumed in 2018 for a second term.
DeFrantz earned a B.A. from Connecticut College, where she began rowing, and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she rowed as a member of Vesper Boat Club.
The two-time Olympian competed on the U.S. National Team from 1975 to 1980, winning a bronze medal in the eight at the 1976 Olympics and a silver medal in the four with coxswain at the 1978 World Championships.
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Plans Unveiled to Expand and Renovate Caspersen Boathouse
USRowing and the Princeton National Rowing Association (PNRA) have unveiled plans to expand and renovate the Caspersen Boathouse on Lake Mercer in New Jersey.
The $7.5-million project, to be completed next year, includes a new weight room, athlete lounge, and multipurpose erg and event space. It is supported by USRowing, PNRA, the National Rowing Foundation, Mercer County, Lawrenceville School, Peddie School, and The Hun School.
“This expansion is about investing in the future of U.S. rowing,” said Josy Verdonkschot, USRowing’s McLane Family Chief High Performance Officer. “It delivers an environment where our athletes can train, recover, and study or work—all under one roof.
“Our mission is to support excellence at every level, and this facility is another big step to ensure our national team has the resources it needs to succeed on the international stage.”
In 2023 Verdonkschot told Rowing News that an updated Mercer Lake facility would serve as one of three main training centers for U.S. rowers as they prepare for the 2028 Olympics. California Rowing Club and an expanded facility at Nathan Benderson Park in Sarasota are the other two locations.
“It’s a great point of pride for Mercer County that we host the U.S. National Rowing Team,” said Mercer County Executive Dan Benson. “The expansion of the Caspersen Rowing Center is an important investment that will create new opportunities for Mercer residents from every background to discover the joy of rowing.”
Vesper Hires Krakic, Brown to Boost Performance
Vesper Boat Club has hired Ivo Krakic as director of rowing and Marqus Brown as head coach of the racing team, as the venerable Philadelphia club pursues high-performance objectives going into the summer.
“Vesper is excited to breathe new life into our storied racing program with the hiring of Krakic and Brown,” said Vesper board member Greg Ansolabehere.
“With an emphasis on big-boat competition, Ivo and Marqus will guide Vesper athletes to podium-level finishes domestically and abroad. In addition to competing at all the regattas we know and love, Vesper intends to forge relationships with other clubs in the rowing community and create new racing opportunities.”
Krakic, a 2017 alumnus of Drexel University who rowed on the Croatian national team, is in his third year as the head coach at La Salle University. He has led the Explorers’ first and second men’s varsity eights to their highest-ever national rankings, finishing 18th and 16th, respectively,???? at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association national championship.
Brown, a La Salle grad and Philly native, has extensive experience across the country, having trained as an elite athlete with Penn AC, coached at the University of Washington, and most recently having run a youth rowing program in Texas.
“They’re both bringing serious experience to the table, and it’s a big step for Vesper as they continue to build their high-performance pipeline,” said Vesper’s communications secretary Allison Mueller. “The summer team is gearing up now, and they’ve had athletes competing at Olympic trials and speed orders, so this feels like a natural evolution.”
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The Day the Demons Flinched
BEATING THE COAST GUARD ACADEMY SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE, BUT STEELED BY A TOUGH COACH, THE WESLEYAN CREW BECAME CAPABLE OF POISE UNDER PRESSURE AND SUPREME DO-OR-DIE EFFORT.
STORY BY TOM MATLACK
Coach Will Scoggins.
New London, Connecticut, April 1986
The water rushes by a mere six inches below me. I do not notice. I have spent hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours in this position. I am the seven man in an eight-man racing shell, meaning I have only the stroke in front of me.
I mirror his every motion. I pick a spot in the middle of his back and concentrate on it. Our arms, backs, and legs coil up in preparation for the entry of the oar into the water. As we catch at full compression, there is a plop when all eight blades hit the water simultaneously.
The boat surges forward. I can hear the bubbles run along the keel as I drive my legs down, pry open my back, and finally finish the stroke by drawing the handle to my body with my arms.
My outside hand taps down on the oar, removing it from the water, while at the same time my inside hand twists the blade parallel to the surface of the water. My leg and abdominal muscles remain taut, while the recovery of the stroke begins again. The boat slows gradually until we hit the next catch, when it surges once again and I again hear bubbles.
The boat is rowing well. It is rock steady. The power is on and then it is off, on then off, on then off. The key is to relax on the recovery, to collect and prepare fully for the next stroke by getting in the appropriate position. This we are doing. The pattern is almost unconscious. I can simply feel it. I become one with my oar. I am my oar. I become one with the other seven oarsmen. Our minds become a single entity. We are part of a machine ready to compete.
The coxswain, Karen, calls for all to “weigh enough.” We take one final stroke and then stop, oars an arm’s length from our bodies. The boat runs out in a glide, our bodies perfectly still, all eight blades off the water balancing without effort.
Finally Karen calls “blades down,” and all eight blades hit the water at the same time. Each of us moves to take off his warm-ups. From a patchwork of favorite hats, sweats, and stinky shirts emerges our
common racing attire, a white shirt with Wesleyan red-and-black trim.
All the now extraneous clothing is passed up man to man until it reaches Karen, who puts it under and behind her seat. She calls, “Count down when ready!” The words “bow, one, two, three, four, five, six” are heard. I add my “seven” and finally David completes the count with “stroke.” Now we are ready.
Just off our port gunnels is the Coast Guard Academy varsity heavyweight eight. No one can remember beating this crew since their rowing program was founded by Olympic gold medalist Bill Stowe in 1971— a 15-year losing streak. The last two years I’ve been humiliated by our performance against them. Both races were “horizon jobs”—our boat was still on the horizon as Coast Guard crossed the finish line.
I drift back to our pre-race discussion the night before. We were sitting in what generally served as a coatroom after dinner at one of the fraternities on campus. Our coach, Will Scoggins, had told us simply to stay with it, his blue eyes burning with intensity.
“The race,” he said, “begins at one thousand meters, at the halfway mark. Whether you are a length up or a length down, simply know that the second thousand meters is yours. Poise is the key. Don’t try anything special. Just do what you do. The same stroke time and again, a length up or a length down. Give everything and you shall receive everything. You have to believe, gentlemen.”
We’ve been preparing for this event since September. The fall in collegiate rowing is a warm-up season consisting of longer head races that are timed but don’t mean much. Our new coach had spent the fall starting from scratch, trying to press the most basic principles of the sport into our brains.
It feels natural to come up the slide on the recovery of the stroke, he had told us, with your shoulders in your eardrums. It is a power move and your body wants to tense up in preparation. The problem with that style is that it is like approaching a 250-pound barbell, bending over, and trying to lift with your arms only. It cannot be done. You have to use your legs to drive
the barbell upward, gaining momentum. That fall, when I would revert to rowing with tense shoulders in practice, Will yelled in his megaphone:
“MATLACK! Would you please make my day and report to the catch. You are late. Get your head out of your ass and relax on the drive. This is a finesse move. We aren’t trying to kill it. Get the damn blade in the water.”
I had improved my technique gradually with the aid of Will’s incessant instruction, but I was still more comfortable in the middle fat part of the boat called the “engine room,” where strength is more important than rowing pretty.
During the winter months leading up to the racing season, rowing teams engage in various forms of off-season conditioning verging on torture. Our prior teams had taken winter training lightly. Will did not. We built our own barbells by filling empty industrial tomato cans with cement and inserting lengths of pipe that we painted black. We used these in a circuit-training routine called “The Bear.”
Every day after class, we met in the lightly used Nicholson dormitory lounge, cleared away the furniture, and cranked up David Bowie on a boom box—“Ch-ch-chch-Changes.” Will pointed out often that acorns don’t become oak trees by growing into big seeds. They have to set down roots and change form completely.
The homemade bars weighed around 50 pounds. The rule was they could not touch the ground at any point during the workout. We did a rotation of exercises, 50 seconds on, 10 seconds off—just enough time to prepare for the next set.
A deep squat to a military press was followed by a triceps curl with the bar behind the head, a lat pull to the eyeballs, and a jumping lunge with the bar overhead, getting up in the air high enough to switch legs forward and back simultaneously without crashing over sideways.
Four simple exercises over and over again. The first 10 or 20 minutes, there is laughter and bawdy banter. Then it gets serious. Muscles ache. Breathing becomes labored. Will suggests that we pair off,
pushing each other, looking into each other’s eyes for strength.
Half an hour in, the music gets turned up. The intensity in the room is palpable. Some of the weaker team members begin faltering. Will begins talking.
“This is gut-check time, gents! This is where fast boats are made, right here! Don’t give up on your mates!”
Sometimes he would tell us upfront how long we were going to go. Sometimes he would make up his mind along the way. Generally it was an hour, though 90 minutes was not unusual. Toward the end of the session, Will sometimes would grab an extra bar himself and do lunges in someone’s face—blue jeans, cowboy boots, and chewing tobacco be damned. Finally, he would call the workout over, and we would collapse in exhaustion, bodies strewn everywhere on the floor. Students coming back from class to their dorm rooms or on their way to dinner at MoCon, the beloved campus dining hall that resembled a flying saucer, would walk by and look at us, wondering what the hell had happened.
Winter training also included various forms of running for strength and endurance. We would do timed miles on the track or take long runs in the snow. But many Saturdays during the winter, we
would meet in the cemetery on the edge of campus, set on a particularly long and steep hill.
The road up twisted and turned, flattening out in a false peak, only to reveal its steepest section just before the summit. Will devised a system in which each team was composed of an equal number of strong and weak oarsmen on the hill. He split each team into three squads, pitting oarsmen of similar hill-climbing ability against one another. He would sit at the top of the hill on the back of his pickup truck with a clipboard in hand keeping score. We usually ran 10 hills, taking about an hour and depleting whatever resources were left from the week’s brutal training.
One Saturday, I had a memorable exchange with a younger teammate. I knew Jon had been out late the night before but still expected him to excel at the hills since he was the best runner on the team, often beating me at the long runs that were my specialty. We battled out the first couple of hills, snorting and swearing upon reaching the top. Then I noticed that he would stay with me for one hill and slow down on the next one. As the captain of the team, I was trying to reinforce the coach’s demand for consistency of effort, and it began to gall that Jon appeared to be dogging it. I was
busting my ass on each repetition, and he should be, too.
On the next hill, I finished first. As I came down, I saw Jon bringing up the rear of our group.
“What the hell are you doing?” I barked in his face, as I pushed him into a snowbank
Jon came up swinging, landing a couple of crisp shots to my jaw before our teammates separated us.
Up on top of the hill, sitting on the back of his pickup truck, Will smiled. He told me later about the Olympic goldmedal crew that reached the dock after their victory and broke out in a brawl. The process of developing underlying trust as a team involved spilling your guts along the way, even showing raw emotion.
Will had made clear from the very beginning that this was about rowing, but it was really about a lot more. It was about growing up and learning the hard way how to avoid making excuses. He liked to say that he was really an educator and an artist who happened to choose boats and oars and men as his medium.
The measure of success was how well our crew rowed. But he believed firmly that excellence on the water had less to do with technique and strength and more to do with the development of the soul. We
worked hard not so much to condition our bodies—though that was a prerequisite— but to condition our minds. The payoff was that this development of the mind could be applied to situations later in life, on the water or off. To Will’s way of thinking, the fight on the hill was a sign of progress—a sign of growing faith in one another.
Back on the racecourse, I do not believe. I am scared and shaking. Will has tried to change my habit of working extremely hard in practice and leaving my best efforts home when it really counts. Everything we’ve done has pointed to this moment. His whole message has been to prepare for the big race. His aim in working with us is to cultivate poise and relaxation at the moment when the natural tendency is to tighten up.
I try to regain concentration. I block out everything but the phrase Will had spoken the night before about one inch from my face, looking into my heart: “fire and ice.”
This for me is the key to unlocking the perfect stroke. On the drive, when my oar is in the water, I have to have the fire of a madman, while on the recovery I have to be as cool as ice. I keep repeating this phrase
to myself a few times and begin to feel a bit more confident.
I envision a huge bubble enclosing me and the rest of my boat. I stare at the bottom of the boat and a little smile crosses my face. I can feel our competition next to us but I do not look up. I concentrate only on our crew. Nothing comes into our bubble and nothing leaves. I can feel the power build among us.
I notice that a strong headwind has picked up, causing a chop off the port bow. No problem. There are no distractions; they are there to weaken the other crew, they make us stronger.
There’s a chop. Good. We have an old fiberglass boat. They have a new carbon-fiber boat. Good. We are prepared to do battle. Will says Spartan warriors were taught never to come home from battle without their shields. They came back with their shields or on top of them. Today, he has us believing that we will win, or die trying.
The starter calls us to the line. We paddle up. He begins the process of getting the boats aligned for the start. I take a deep breath, in and out. Finally he tells us that we are even. The coxswains must now “get their points,” maneuvering so the boats are pointed directly down the course.
Karen sits with her hand in the air to
indicate we’re not ready.
“Give me two strokes bow,” she says. “Good.”
I take a really deep breath, way in and all the way out. Fire and ice.
“This is it, gents, sit tall,” Karen growls.
The starter bellows: “I see two hands! I see one hand! I see no hands! READY ALL, ROW!”
We are off. Karen counts out 20 short quick strokes to get the boat moving and up to speed. The boat wobbles a bit on stroke 14 and 15. No problem. Then on stroke 20, Karen commands, “Settle!”
Our strokes per minute drop from 40 to 34 in an instant. A wave hits the side of the boat. We flop for a second but get it back quickly. Karen begins to call us off the other boat. We are seven seats behind. We have time. Fire and ice!
We cross the 500-meter mark. We are now a full length down. Stay steady. The boat is not rowing smoothly but the power is there. Relax! I am surprised, at the 1,000-meter mark, to feel remarkably rested. But we are still a length down.
“The race starts here, right now, gentlemen!” Karen screams.
Just as she says that I realize that I do feel pain, almost like my body is playing a dirty trick on me. At each catch, my back
and legs burn as I explode off the foot stretchers. My stomach tightens into a ball. For a moment, I’m not sure I can go on. But as we continue, my body goes numb. I am floating above it, watching what’s going on. The discomfort is a distant ache. I put my blade in, pull as hard as I can, and take it out. Simple.
We pass Coast Guard’s new boathouse. Seven hundred meters to go. I hear the crowd cheer, but I am focused on Karen’s call.
“You are bow to stern. Now you are moving! Yes! Their coxswain is on the bow ball now. Keep him coming! This is it.
“Last six hundred. Now he is on you, Alex! Pass him down to Peter. Yes, you have got it! They are dying. This race is ours!
“Let’s go. Keith, give me that coxswain! He is on you, Tom. Only two seats now. FIVE HUNDRED METERS TO GO. Give me that coxswain! Give him to me! YES, GENTLEMEN WE ARE EVEN!
“Walk me down that boat! I am on their stroke! I am on their seven man! I’m on their six man! I am on their bow ball! Give me a full length!”
As soon as Karen calls us even, all pain disappears. We are a single consciousness now. I hear the plop of all eight of our blades hitting the water simultaneously at
the catch. The boat surges forward as we drive our legs down, pry open our backs, and draw the handle through with our lat and biceps muscles. The boat glides out rock steady on each recovery. Once again, bubbles.
Now we are a length ahead. Now we are open-water between our stern and their bow. There are 100 meters to go. I begin thinking, “We are actually going to win this thing!”
Where is the finish line? Come on, where is it? No mistakes now. Just stay steady. Don’t blow it. Just a little farther. Maintain concentration.
Karen calls the rating up for the final sprint. Then we pass the finish observatory.
“We did it!” Karen screams, jumping up to try to hug us without tipping the boat over.
I raise my fist and shake it in the air. We are all yelling. I look over to shore, and our teammates are going crazy. Someone in the Coast Guard boat mumbles “Congratulations” and “Nice row.”
Yes, I do believe. Will, it all happened just as you said it would.
Back at the boathouse, the Coast Guard oarsmen approach with shirts in hand. As is customary, we have bet shirts on the race, so as victors it’s time to collect our spoils.
There’s nothing quite so humiliating as handing over the shirt on your back to the winner, or so satisfying as receiving it.
Jon, the same teammate I pushed into the snowbank, approaches me. He’s become the little brother I never had. We have had our fights, as brothers often do. But we are best friends as well. He tells me that even though he didn’t row the race, he felt there was a lot of him out there—and he was proud to be part of it.
For the rest of the day, I can’t stop smiling. We have broken through our limitations individually and as a team. In September, none of us thought this day was possible. We had changed ourselves into a boat capable of poise under pressure and competing at a high level. The rest of the year, we keep winning but no victory is as sweet as this first one.
Looking back, I realize how few chances there are in life to look one’s demons in the eye and see who flinches first. In a sporting event that rarely earns mention in the local paper, I had the opportunity, at least on that spring day, to face my demons and see that they were nothing but shadows.
TOM MATLACK Is a mentor to men in business and life. He rowed for Will Scoggins at Wesleyan from 1985 to ‘87. His son, Cole, rows for Brown University.
10 Ways to Save Rowing
ROWING IS THRIVING AT THE MOMENT, BUT BECAUSE OF THE BABY BUST, 15 YEARS FROM NOW, THE NUMBER OF ROWINGAGE HIGH-SCHOOL AND COLLEGE STUDENTS WILL DROP BY NEARLY HALF A MILLION.
STORY BY CHIP DAVIS
With major U.S. regattas like the Head of the Hooch, San Diego Crew Classic, and Youth Nationals attracting record fields across the country, our sport is in fine shape, as far as participation in racing is concerned.
For now.
The overwhelming majority of U.S. rowers are students, participating mostly through schools, junior clubs, and universities, and the school-age population of the U.S. is about to go off what those who study it call “the demographic cliff.”
After the Great Recession, beginning in late 2007, Americans began having far fewer babies, and kept having fewer. As a result, the number of 18-year-olds is now beginning to drop, and 15 years from now, there will be nearly half a million fewer rowing-age students—3.4 million in 2041, down from 3.9 million today—according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (which studies the student population of the entire country).
Forewarned is forearmed, so here, in our continuing service to the rowing community, are Ten Ways to Save Rowing from going off the 13-percent cliff drop we know is coming.
1Let everyone else in on the secret of our great sport. Rowing is both the world’s, and America’s, original intercollegiate athletic contest—The Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge (1829), and the Harvard–Yale race (1852)—and both are going strong still.
The Brits have done an admirable job of making what legendary collegiate and Olympic coach Mike Teti once called “a slow boat beating a slower boat” interesting enough through the magic of professional promotion and video presentation to attract 2.82 million viewers this year. In the UK, it was more popular on TV that weekend than Formula One’s Bahrain Grand Prix and The Masters. It was also the most-watched female sporting event in the UK, according to Kantar analysis and BARB (the British equivalent of Nielsen ratings).
“The Boat Race represents the best of the British—two world-leading universities competing in one of the oldest major sporting events,” said Siobhan Cassidy, chair of The Boat Race Company. “Each year, we tell the stories of the highs and lows of the student-athletes competing in this amateur race, epitomizing the
athletic challenge, personal sacrifice, and teamwork required.”
2
The Oarsman award.
We can do the same here in the U.S., as soon as we get over our self-perpetuated special secret status within the world of sports and begin shaving the sharp corners off our square peg to fit into the round hole of athletic understanding.
“During my years in rowing, I’ve looked enviously at other sports and all the trappings of normalcy they had,” said Chris Clark, Wisconsin’s most tenured head coach in any sport, “coaches associations, multiple year-end awards, all-Americans, student-athlete awards, et cetera.”
A great example of doing this right is the Intercollegiate Rowing Coaches Association’s recently announced The Oarsman award, which will be rowing’s Heisman Trophy. Everybody in sportsmad America knows what the Heisman is, and now men’s rowing has a way to capture public attention every year at national-championship time, as does football, by recognizing a standout oarsman.
The Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association has similar awards for women, I’m told. RowingNews.com ran the story of the 2024 winners, but I don’t remember. Let’s change that with a catchy name and some professional marketing and communication.
3Invite others to our regattas. If you haven’t been to a parent-supported regatta like Philadelphia’s Stotesbury Cup Regatta, you owe it to yourself to go, if only to witness the massive spreads of food and refreshments produced from small “chuckwagon” box trailers brought and set up by parents. It’s rowing’s cross between tailgating and showing parental love and support for your kids’ crew calorically— babushka by the boats.
If each crew tasked those motivated and engaged parents with reaching out to their local news media, community website, and/or listserv and inviting folks to come see a race (and telling the media folks they’ll be fed; there’s no cheaper media buy than giving a sportswriter free food), the leveraged exposure would be significant.
Once we’ve made people aware of rowing, make it fun to watch. To wit:
4
Row-up music. At professional (and most collegiate) baseball games, a catchy song unique to each player blasts out of loudspeakers as he comes up to bat, energizing the crowd and filling the dead time between batters.
Rowing should have our own version of walk-up songs, played as a crew rows up and backs into the starting platform. It would fill the time between races, which feels even longer when you’re watching the livestream and suffering through the valiant but vain efforts by commentators to fill the broadcast with interesting chatter.
How would the order of row-ups be decided? Glad you asked:
5
Let the crews pick the lanes.
The winning crew from the faster semifinal would row up first and pick whichever lane they want. That’s right—no assigned lanes, and fastest picks first, adding to the pre-race intrigue. Race officials and coaches would be spared the difficult and often contentious chore of deciding when to shift lane assignments in response to changing winds so top qualifiers keep the preferred lanes.
It would be up to each coxswain to decide, live, for all to see, cheer, and debate. The winner of the second-fastest heat would row up second and could choose to race next to the other heat winner or in what the coxswain believes is a better lane or hide on the other side of the course—whatever each crew decides, in order from top qualifier to last.
Bow numbers would be extraneous, as they are already. (I’ve been going to rowing regattas, from the Olympics to the Manny Flicks, for decades and can’t remember the last time I saw a crew leave its buoyed lane in a race.)
6
Replace bow numbers with crews logos.
Instead of numbers, bow clips should hold placards with the crew’s school or club logo and colors, the brighter and more distinctive the better. Spectators, both at the regatta and watching on screens, don’t care what lane each crew is in. We just want to know which crew is which. Show us!
7
Make being a rower more fun. Doing tons of training volume in a year-round, multi-year (and multi-quadrennial) program may be the most effective way to prepare future
Olympians to win gold medals at the Games, but that kind of life isn’t much fun for most people. And let’s face it, 99.9 percent of us are never going to race for, let alone win, Olympic gold. The U.S. National Team qualified 12 boats to race at the Paris Olympics, and one—the men’s four—won gold, so that’s four guys out of the roughly 100,000 rowers on American racecourses this spring.
Let’s look at having more fun than rowing 200,000 meters a week to race only a handful of times. How about more of the fun parts—racing, making new friends, and seeing new places—and less of the drudgery?
“We want to do the national collegiate lightweight invitational, which we’ve been doing for the last four years, in Sarasota next year,” said Princeton lightweight coach Marty Crotty. “Get it on a real world-class course, with the drones and the commentators. That’s the kind of stuff we need to do. Do it, like, February 28th.”
Swedish speedskater Nils van der Poel set a world record for 10 kilometers in winning the 2022 Olympic title. He subsequently self-published a free book online, How to Skate a 10K, in which he writes, “I almost always trained for five days and then resting [sic] for two days. My rest days were usually during weekends, doing fun stuff with my friends.”
There’s an idea!
8Race more and reward it.
Children instinctively know that the first one across the line wins and will usually race each other the very first time they sit on an erg or in a boat. Any time two or more boats are aligned on the water, it’s a race. Even some of the most experienced rowers have to be taught and monitored continually to train within certain “zones” for maximum physiological benefit over the long term— which is a very long term relative to the always-on, instant-gratification, screenbased existence of today’s student-athletes. We shouldn’t fight natural racing instincts. We should embrace and reward them. If we set up competitive situations in which athletes, especially youth athletes, don’t always win or lose but experience intermittent reinforcement that rewards racing, they can have more fun.
As van der Poel writes in the epilogue of his book:
“The hardest thing about this program was getting through it with a
smile upon my face. When I found ways to enjoy it, I was unstoppable. Sometimes, to get through more hours, what was needed was an ice cream, and sometimes it was multiple ice creams.”
9Scull in the fall, erg in the winter, and row in the spring.
Every year, at the end of May and beginning of June, the NCAA and IRA national championships are won by the same teams representing a handful of great programs. There’s no real chance for the remaining hundreds of college crews to win a national championship. (On the junior level, USRowing’s Youth National Championship seems to be heading the same hegemonic way of a few superclubs as well.)
The rowing year when tied to the school year (as it almost always is) can be long. Too long, in fact. With spring racing seasons now beginning in February, and varsity college programs populated almost exclusively by experienced high-school and junior recruits, do we really need to be sweep rowing all fall, too?
“We don’t have to go to these head races and have them rowing 10, 11, 12 sessions a week, when you include the weight training and the mobility sessions and the visits to the trainer,” said Crotty. “These kids are hanging on by a thread, most of them. Some schools are starting August 15th, and they’re going all the way to June 1st and they get no break.”
We should take a page out of running’s very successful playbook: cross-country in the fall, indoor track in the winter, track and field in the spring. The same coaching staff serves a group of student-athletes who can win team or individual national championships in different events in different seasons.
With an autumn sculling season, student-athletes would be in smaller (and tippy) boats while the water is still relatively warm from the summer, racing in events in which a small program with only one or two great athletes could win the occasional national championship.
In winter, the ubiquitous Concept2 ergometer gives anyone an opportunity to compete. A varsity of one could win a national championship, and a student population of 3.9 million—soon to be 3.4 million—could have easy access to competitive rowing.
“That would be fantastic,” said the director of rowing at an Ivy League school. “Then the athletic directors can count us as one roster, three sports.”
Qualify for the Olympics by country rather than boat. As it stands now, qualification to race at the Olympics, which is limited to 502 rowers, is based on a boat’s performance in one of the 12 current Olympic events at the previous year’s World Rowing Championships. With so few boats racing at the Olympics—only seven eights and nine quads, for example—athletes rarely race in more than one event. Result: In rowing, multiple gold medal-winning stars are never born.
Instead, up to 40 different countries would qualify 12 males or 12 females to compete in as many of the 24 events (men’s and women’s; lightweight and openweight; single, double, quad, pair, and four; plus open quads and eights) as they choose. The remaining 22 (40x12=480) spots would go to qualifying single scullers worldwide to encourage truly global participation from the remaining countries.
Within the current nine-day Olympic rowing regatta, there’s plenty of time for athletes to race in multiple events, especially now that repechage heats have been eliminated.
“If we could have doubled up everyone against everyone else, oh, that would have been wonderful,” said Tom Terhaar, who with Laurel Korholz, coached the U.S women’s eight on their historic 11-year winning streak. “It would have been great.”
“The small boat [rowing] really helps a big boat. The athletes felt that way, too. One year, I doubled up a pair and a double into the eight, and the pair and the double did well, and then the eight set a world record and won. Theoretically, half the boat was ‘tired’, and the other four who were banging around in the straight four at the time, were like, ‘Why don’t we get to double up?’”
Give Olympic rowers a regatta in which they can race as many events as they want, and we’ll have multiple-gold winners like Michael Phelps and Simone Biles—and exactly the kind of popularity that will save rowing.
CHIP DAVIS is the founder and publisher of Rowing News An oarsman from birth, he rowed on championship crews at St. Paul’s School and Dartmouth College, where he captained the lightweights. Now he sculls in Vermont when the weather is suitable and ergs the other half of the year.
THE
INTERVIEW
JEANCHRISTOPHE ROLLAND
TO REMAIN AN OLYMPIC SPORT, ROWING MUST BOOST PARTICIPATION AND ATTRACT AND CONNECT WITH MORE PEOPLE, SAYS THE PRESIDENT OF WORLD ROWING.
“IF WE DON’T ADAPT, WE DIE.”
INTERVIEW BY CHIP DAVIS PHOTOS BY LISA WORTHY AND INTERSPORT IMAGES
Olympic champion Jean-Christophe Rolland became one of the youngest international sports-federation presidents when he succeeded, at age 46, the very successful Denis Oswald in 2014 to lead FISA, now called World Rowing, the international rowing federation.
The three-time French Olympian in the pair—fourth in 1992, bronze in 1996, and gold in 2000—was also a world champion in the discipline of indoor rowing, winning the CRASH-Bs in 2003 (5:48) while also holding the French record (5:46) for a decade.
A nuclear engineer by training, J-C Rolland spent his career with France’s nuclear giant EDF and eventually oversaw its Olympic sponsorship of the 2012 London Games. He’s served World Rowing early and often, including as a referee, but much of what he’s done for rowing is behind the scenes, navigating and participating in the politics, business, and machinations of the International Olympic Committee.
He and his World Rowing colleagues and allies have saved rowing’s place in the Games—for which they receive scant credit—while making unpopular changes, including the elimination of lightweight events and shortening the Olympic race distance to 1,500 meters for LA 2028.
A proud Frenchman, he’s also a polyglot (French, English, and Italian) who graciously took time from a schedule packed with TV-rights negotiations, IOC elections, and leading the international administration of our sport to give Rowing News an interview entirely in English.
Rowing News: Our community assumes rowing will always be in the Olympics, but that’s not the case, is it? You’ve done a lot to keep our sport’s place in the Games and to hold spots for over 500 rowers in the Olympics. Tell us about that.
We’ve been included in the Olympic program since the very beginning in 1896, but that doesn’t mean that it’s granted forever. As you know, there’s a lot of pressure because a lot of sports would like to be included. So the IOC is making an evaluation after each Olympic Games. You continuously have to be reappointed or re-included in the Olympic program. Therefore, we have to do everything necessary to ensure that we remain an Olympic sport and influential in the Olympic movement. This is my day-to-day business and fight.
I’m used to saying that rowing is not in danger but certainly at risk. Rowing
is recognized as a fantastic sport— fantastic values, fantastic athletes, and the competition itself is fantastic. We do have our strengths in asserting our value to participating in the Olympic Games, but it doesn’t mean we’re safe.
The Olympic Games can survive easily without rowing. The converse is less true. Being in the Olympic Games makes a huge difference. So that’s why my duty is to understand the context, to understand the challenges of the IOC and that the world of sport is facing, and to ensure that we navigate in this context so that we can ensure the best future for the sport.
Rowing News: World Rowing’s work to keep rowing in the Olympics has been successful, but the World Rowing Cup and interest in World Rowing Championships are not going well, with shrinking attendance and only two World Cup events this year. The World Indoor Rowing Championships are no bigger or better than the CRASH-Bs were 20 years ago. To what do you attribute the lack of success and interest?
I agree that we are struggling with participation at the World Cup. That’s why we have a project called SECR—Strategic Events and Calendar Review—to adapt our product to the current environment, and we are moving ahead here.
First—and this is the vision I had when I began in this role—is to extend the sport of rowing in its different disciplines: classic rowing, coastal rowing, and indoor rowing.
This is the way to enlarge the rowing community and connect more people to our sport, which is absolutely essential.
Yes, we do struggle with the attractiveness of some of our events. Attractiveness is built with the quality of the event, and therefore we must ensure participation. Participation is absolutely key, and we have seen the number of entries declining.
At the same time, we now have 28 world titles for classic rowing, which comes with difficulties for organizing committees because the number of races is immense and for member federations because the size of the teams is too big.
Twenty years ago, the number of events in the world in Olympic sports was a couple of hundred per year. Now we are at a couple thousand a year, so we are in a very competitive and tough environment as the number of potential hosts is more or less the same. Therefore, we have to keep cost and complexity at a level that ensures
national teams can participate. We have to present the sport differently to make it more attractive. We can benefit from new technologies to provide more elements, more stories, more data, not only for core rowing fans and spectators, but also to enlarge the number of people interested in the sport.
Rowing News: Right now, other major rowing regattas around the world are having record events. The Head of the Charles, Henley Royal Regatta, the Australian National Rowing Championships, the San Diego Crew Classic—they’ve all had banner years. Why hasn’t World Rowing partnered with successful events to make a real worldwide World Rowing Cup series?
I would love to, and this is something we can investigate. But when it comes to our sport, it has been, and still is, very coach-oriented. The value of our events is the Olympic Games first, then the World Championships, and then the rest.
When you speak with the head performance coaches, they want to build the best crew for the best events, the World Championships. When you speak with our member federations, what is important for the government and the local authorities is clear: They value the World Championships, sometimes the continental event, and that’s it.
If you win the Head of the Charles, will you get money from the government? No. This is my concern. Who decides on the participation of the teams? Is it the president of the national federation or is it the coach? For the coaches, the incentive is to achieve the best result at the World Championships, so they will decide which events the crew will participate in. And that’s why I’m frustrated and furious at the lack of participation at World Cup events, because the coaches will say, “We want to be at the top at the World Championships, and it’s all about preparation. We are a sport that is built 95 percent on training and five percent on competition.”
We are considering incentives to participate in different events before you can enter the World Championships or even the Olympic Games. The World Cup system was designed to have the best athletes build their story, build their career. This is very frustrating because we have coaches saying, “I don’t want my team to go there. I will just train.”
We are struggling with broadcasters. We just concluded our negotiation with the European Broadcasting Union. It’s a
very strong partner, and this partnership is generating revenues for World Rowing, but the comments from EBU are, “We enjoy rowing on TV. Our members, the national broadcasters, like rowing, but what do you have to offer? Only two [events]?”
To participate in the World Triathlon championships, you have to take part in five of the eight World Cups. This is a way to elevate the credibility of the event by ensuring participation. Having a similar pathway to be able to compete at the World Championships is an option that we are currently looking at.
What’s at stake is the future of our sport, and it’s essential that we all understand that adaptation is absolutely key. If we don’t adapt, we will die.
Rowing News: The mixed eight, e-sports rowing, and even Beach Sprints aren’t popular grassroots parts of our sport. They’re artificial gimmicks that haven’t taken root. World Rowing executive director Vincent Galliard talks about being in the third year of a 15-year plan, but it’s clearly not working. How long is World Rowing going to stick to a plan that’s not getting results?
I disagree. With the mixed event, we have not reached a point where you can make any conclusion.
In many countries, it’s difficult to build an eight because of the lack of athletes and/or resources. But if you have four women and four men, you can build the [mixed] eight. So we see it as increasing the opportunity for middle-size or small-size federations to build an eight which will create more opportunities for these countries.
The mixed event already exists at the national level in some countries and was
very successful at the last PanAm Games. It is also a well-established Para-rowing event. This is a trend not only in our sport but in many sports. Inclusion is absolutely key, and there’s no reason we cannot have a male and female in the same boat. If you find a good reason not to do it, I’m very interested in having this discussion.
As for indoor rowing, I don’t want to discount the tradition of rowing. I am a traditional rower on the water, and that is where I come from. That being said, we see, in this new discipline, a way to attract more people and grow the community connected to rowing. So I don’t see it as a threat but as a good way to reach the critical mass that will help us survive.
The World Rowing Indoor Championships are increasing in attractiveness, because of new technologies and the connected environment. We have huge potential. I agree we have not reached the best product yet, but we are improving. We have great ideas. We will probably not succeed the first time. We have to adapt, we have to learn, we have to innovate.
We believe that indoor rowing will fit very well in the newly-created Olympic Esports Games, but not in the way we have always considered indoor rowing.
We are discussing with publishers about the interaction between athletes and indoor machines in different ways; not just about numbers, but to make it more fun and to attract a new audience. Rowing on the machine at first is not very fun, but we can make it fun with better interaction.
It’s incredible to see a young boy or girl playing on the rowing machine, playing with software and exercise. I think we can contribute to society, which is facing a huge challenge in terms of mental
health and well-being and the lack of physical activity. Attracting children to our sport through physical activity and entertainment is a way to grow, to develop.
I disagree that this is not the way to move forward. Our goal is not to undermine classic rowing but to make a bigger cake.
Rowing News: When the Quadrennial Congress approved the mixed eight, it said that the event could be added as soon as LA 2028. The Paris Olympics had surfing events in Tahiti. LA 2028 will have whitewater canoe and kayak in Oklahoma City. So why not have LA 2028 rowing events at Nathan Benderson Park in Sarasota instead of this bastardized 1,500-meter sham in the Olympics? The 2017 World Rowing Championships there were a huge success.
I agree that Sarasota is a fantastic place for classic rowing. That said, it’s a decision we cannot change, and the matter is no longer open for discussion. It’s not a perfect or ideal solution, I admit, but the decision was made after a very long journey of investigation and analysis involving many factors and many stakeholders.
To have coastal rowing and Beach Sprints in LA has been a seven-year-long project, and it was approved by the IOC executive board in 2023.
Rowing News: In the Olympic program, why not have countries rather than individual boats qualify for the Olympics, so that 20 athletes from each country can compete in as many events as they choose? And why not race on the Seine in Paris or on the Brisbane River in the next Olympics?
Rowing on rivers is fantastic—for masters and recreational athletes. But when it comes to elite athletes with four years of their life invested, it’s another matter.
The Head of the Charles is popular, with massive participation, but it’s a different kind of rowing. You may think we should have such an event—head of a river—in the Olympic Games. Then I would say, “Why not on the River Seine? Why not on the Brisbane River?” But for now, certainly not for elite athletes in a side-by-side rowing competition.
We must keep our minds open and try always to innovate, to look at what’s working and what’s not. This is a continuous exercise we have to have every Olympic cycle, so the decisions we are making now are for 2036.
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The Principles of Periodization
Progressive increases in training demands should be followed by periods of lower training loads to enable an athlete’s body to adapt and to improve performance.
Periodization is a tried -and-true method for organizing training.
The first to use the term was Soviet physiologist Leonid Matveyev in 1964. In studying Olympians, he discerned patterns in the training of successful athletes that led him to develop the concept.
In the years since, much research has been done on periodization, but the main principles still apply. Periodization is a system for training in which load and recovery vary based on physiological principles.
Typically, a gradual increase in training volume and intensity is followed by periods of lower training loads. The idea is that progressive increases in training
demands should be followed by periods of lower training loads to enable an athlete’s body to adapt and to improve performance.
The goal of training periodization is twofold:
—to maximize fitness and athletic performance while minimizing overtraining and the risk of injury; —to manipulate training variables so that athletes peak at the desired time. Athletes need to develop several sport-specific qualities to perform well—strength, endurance, technique, tactical skill, psychological toughness, etc. Since such qualities can’t be acquired simultaneously, certain periods of the training year are reserved for focusing on them sequentially.
Matveyev’s training model consists of three phases: preparation, competition, and transition.
The preparation phase is for building basic athletic skills, such as, in rowing especially, endurance, strength, technique, and the ability to recover from strenuous training.
In the competition phase, athletes increase the intensity of exertion to transform basic skills into racing speed, while learning the rules of competition, improving tactical skills, and building sufficient endurance to withstand the rigors of competition.
The transition period is for healing injuries and recovering from training and racing.
SPORT SCIENCE
The U.S. National Team trains at Nathan Benderson Park.
TRAINING
Because most rowers have a spring and autumn season, the sequence of preparation, competition, and transition should be carried out twice a year. Double periodization can be very successful when all phases are planned and timed well, beginning with the climactic regatta and going backward from there.
Usually, coaches are quite capable of executing the preparation and competition periods, but they find it harder to
A gradual increase in training volume and intensity is followed by periods of lower training loads. The idea is that progressive increases in training demands should be followed by periods of lower training loads to enable an athlete’s body to adapt and to improve performance.
acknowledge the importance of the transition period. Some coaches figure that everyone just needs a break or they fear losing the fitness gained in previous phases.
The transition period is an essential part of Matveyev’s scheme and, when designed correctly, can benefit athletes enormously. It provides a respite from rowing and the stress of competition and an opportunity to recharge by enjoying other sports—swimming, surfing, hiking.
It’s also a time for attending to injuries that may not have healed fully and for improving in such areas as balance, coordination, rhythm, and flexibility.
During this phase, basic fitness can be maintained with an easy run on the beach or a leisurely bike ride in the mountains. Training volume and intensity should yield to fun, refreshment, and rejuvenation.
VOLKER NOLTE, an internationally recognized expert on the biomechanics of rowing, is the author of Rowing Science, Rowing Faster, and Masters Rowing. He’s a retired professor of biomechanics at the University of Western Ontario, where he coached the men’s rowing team to three Canadian national titles.
Coxing Your Way to Dream U.
It’s virtually impossible to be recruited without coxing audio. With no erg score to speak for you, your audio does the talking. Said one coach: “The recording is basically pass/fail.”
During the recruiting process, college coaches must follow NCAA rules about communication. Division I coaches can begin communicating as early as June 15 following your sophomore year. In-person contact, however, isn’t allowed until Aug. 1, either off campus or as part of an unofficial visit. So if you’re planning on meeting a DI coach to see the boathouse, make sure it happens after the first of August.
Rules vary significantly across divisions and teams. If you’re interested in coxing a DI men’s team, you won’t be able to make an official visit until classes begin your senior year. For a DI women’s team, you can visit beginning your junior fall.
DII and III schools have
different restrictions on contact and communication, so if you’re interested in coxing for different divisions, don’t hesitate to ask the coaches questions about rules.
Once you’ve made a list of prospective colleges, the next step is reaching out. First, check the website for information for recruits and about the coaching staff. If there are instructions about how to reach out, follow them. If there’s a recruiting questionnaire for the team, fill it out and follow up with an email. Don’t just fill out the recruiting questionnaire and hope for the best.
Programs split up recruiting in different ways, but if there’s someone on the page identified as a recruiting coach, make sure to contact that coach. If you’re tempted to email everyone on the coaching
PHOTO:
staff, fine, but email only the rowing coaches and leave team support staff like athletic trainers, dietitians, and boatmen off the email.
Proofread your emails. This sounds obvious, but every year candidates send emails using the wrong name of the school and coach. A small error isn’t the end of the world, but do your best and write your own emails. Most coaches are pleased when parents or other advisors are part of the process, but make sure you represent yourself accurately.
In accordance with NCAA rules, a good introductory email should include your graduation year and year in school, preferably early in the email or in the subject line. The email doesn’t need to be long; coaches get a lot of emails. You want to use the message to make the coaches aware of your existence and your interest in their program.
Include your full name and the program you cox for, as well as the school you attend if you’re at a club program. This is important information that allows the coaches to connect your email with
the questionnaire you filled out. You also should share basic information about yourself and your team—how long you’ve been coxing, how you and your program are performing, and your academic and extracurricular interests.
Be prepared to share your academic transcript as well as an audio recording of yourself coxing either in your first email or shortly thereafter. If you don’t have a recording, prioritize getting one to the coach early in the recruiting process. It’s virtually impossible to be recruited without coxing audio.
“We get hundreds of emails for each coxswain spot,” said a coach who requested anonymity. “Your email isn’t going to differentiate you. The thing that makes you stand out is going to be your recording.
“The recording is basically pass/fail,” the coach continued, meaning that the recording is either good enough for the school to begin the recruiting process or not.
Your recording doesn’t need to be perfect; every coxswain is always learning. Ask your current coach to help you select
your strongest bit. You can be candid with recruiters about what you’re working on, too. It’s good for them to know you’re aware of your strengths and weaknesses and working on them proactively.
As a coxswain, you don’t have an erg score to speak for you. Your audio does most of the talking, as well as your interactions with coaches, whether face to face or on the phone. A recommendation from your present coach also makes a difference.
Not all college coaches will contact your current coach for input but many will. If you’ve changed programs recently or have a new coach, provide contact information for your current coach as well as the former coach who knows you well.
Beyond a coach recommendation, “the boat you’re in matters,” said the same coach.
“It’s hard not to be biased toward people from successful programs or people who’ve been in successful boats,” another recruiter said.
You don’t have to be in the top boat— although it doesn’t hurt—but it’s beneficial to provide context for where you are. Maybe you’re a U17 and ranked second behind a very experienced U19 coxswain. Maybe there are three or four coxswains in your year competing for seats in a boat, and you’re in the thick of the competition. Be upfront about your results and boatings and, under no circumstances, embellish your credentials. You’ll be found out, which will reflect poorly on you and your program. Be direct and clear.
Coxswain recruiting varies wildly from program to program. Some programs recruit multiple coxswains, while others focus their recruiting on rowers and rely primarily on a steady stream of experienced walk-ons.
Some programs hold coxswains and rowers to the same academic standard, and some hold coxswains to a higher one. Said one coach I spoke to: “Being smart on paper doesn’t make you a good coxswain, but it sure doesn’t make you worse.”
HANNAH WOODRUFF is an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator for the Radcliffe heavyweight team. She began rowing at Phillips Exeter Academy, was a coxswain at Wellesley College, and has coached college, highschool, and club crews for over 10 years
Anja Cheng coxes the Harvard lightweight varsity at Eastern Sprints.
TRAINING
Start Early—and Follow the Rules
Recruiting isn’t just about colleges choosing athletes; it’s also about your learning what kind of program and coaching style will be the right fit for you.
If you’re a high-school rower thinking about competing at the college level, the time to begin preparing is now. Even if you’re only in ninth or 10th grade and not yet allowed to speak directly with college coaches, there’s still a lot you can do to get ready—and a few things about which you need to be careful.
First, make sure you’re on track academically. You’ll need to take the right core courses to be eligible to row at the university level, and that planning should
begin early. Your grades, and your SAT or ACT scores, will be major factors in your chances of being admitted to top schools. Coaches look at more than just your rowing ability; they want to know you can succeed in the classroom, too.
Of course, your athletic performance matters. Your erg scores, technique, and results on the water are all key parts of your recruiting profile.
As I work with rowers across the U.S. and around the world, I’ve become aware
of a concerning trend: Some 10th graders and their families are being contacted by college coaches before NCAA rules allow. Sometimes coaches will say things like, “This is just between us,” or refer to it as “soft recruiting.” No matter what they call it, it’s not permitted under NCAA rules.
So what should you do if coaches reach out too early? Be polite but clear. Let them know you’re aware of the rules and ask them to wait until the official recruiting window opens.
It’s important to remember that recruiting isn’t just about colleges choosing athletes; it’s also about your learning what kind of program and coaching style will be the right fit for you. That means the process should be transparent, respectful, and ruleabiding.
So what should you do if coaches reach out too early? Be polite but clear. Let them know you’re aware of the rules and ask them to wait until the official recruiting window opens. If the contact continues, consider forwarding the message to the head coach. Most coaches will understand and stop right away; some may have thought you were older and made an honest mistake.
By beginning early, staying informed, and sticking to the rules, you’ll be setting yourself up for success—not only as a recruit but also a student-athlete who’s ready to thrive at the next level.
Harvard University, Newell Boathouse (renovation)
Joint Project with Bruner Cott Architects
Photo ©Peterson Architects
ROBBIE TENENBAUM coached at the NCAA level for over 30 years and with the U.S. Junior National Team for eight. He now helps rowers and families navigate the university recruiting process.
Watering Your Body
Dehydration can happen during one bout of intensive exercise. Other times, it sneaks in over the course of several days of torrid weather.
To listen to advertisements for preworkout products, sports drinks, electrolyte replacers, and recovery beverages, you’d think every person who exercises needs to worry about maintaining optimal fluid and electrolyte balance for every workout.
While there’s no harm in replacing sweat losses vigilantly, rest assured: Most rowers who train for fewer than 60 to 90 minutes a day are unlikely to become dehydrated or depleted of electrolytes. That’s most of us!
Indeed, certain athletes should pay close attention to maintaining a proper fluid and electrolyte balance, including longdistance cyclists, marathoners, triathletes, and other endurance athletes who train in the heat for extended periods of time. So should soccer players during a hot-weather tournament, competitive tennis players baking on sunny tennis courts, football players training in full uniform during steamy weather, and rowers who simply sweat a lot. (Some athletes sweat more than others; sweat rates vary widely.)
Dehydration can happen during one bout of intensive exercise; other times, it sneaks in over the course of several days of torrid weather. The longer your exposure to heat, the greater your risk of becoming dehydrated. That’s why soldiers, construction workers, and gardeners who are exposed day after day to hot weather should have a fluid plan that contributes to a need to urinate at least every four hours.
The goal is to lose no more than two percent of your body weight during a workout. That’s three pounds of sweat for a 150-pound rower (as calculated from preand post-exercise weigh-ins). Minimizing dehydration during exercise contributes to a far easier recovery. Post workout, you’ll feel better and have more energy the rest of your day. No need to feel zapped.
As summer approaches, the following hydration facts and fallacies will help you survive training and competing in today’s hotter climate.
• Being well hydrated makes exercise feel easier. Your body functions best physically and mentally when it’s in fluid and electrolyte balance, not under-hydrated and certainly not seriously dehydrated.
• When you exercise dehydrated, your muscles, heart, lungs, and brain function less efficiently. These negative effects get amplified by heat, and your performance will decline. In a study with cyclists who biked for two hours in the heat, those who drank too little and lost two percent of their body weight reported higher heart rate, perceived effort, and glycogen use compared to cyclists who were dehydrated by one percent.
• Many top marathoners lose five percent to six percent of their body weight (a gallon of sweat!) during a marathon. Would they perform even better if they could drink more? Seems likely.
• As humans, we cannot adapt to dehydration but we can adjust to the feelings of being dehydrated. That is, if from time to time you train under-hydrated, you will become familiar with how it feels. The far wiser path is to learn to prevent dehydration by matching sweat losses with fluid intake. Practice doing this during training sessions.
• Your desire to drink is controlled by feedback loops that make you feel thirsty (or not). The feedback is based on losses of water and sodium from the kidneys. Tanking up two hours before exercise allows time for the kidneys to process and eliminate the excess before you begin to exercise. During exercise, kidneys conserve water and produce less urine; hence, you’ll experience less of an urge to urinate.
• The right balance of body fluids inside and around cells gets regulated by electrolytes such as sodium and potassium. The concentration of sodium in your blood actually increases during exercise because you lose proportionately more water than sodium, unless you over-hydrate by drinking too much plain water during extended exercise. The more you row in the
heat, the less sodium you lose because your body learns to conserve sodium and other electrolytes.
• An effective way to help maintain fluid and electrolyte balance is to consume about 500 milligrams of sodium 90 minutes before you begin to row in the heat. That’s as simple as adding extra salt to pre-exercise oatmeal, eggs, or potato before you exercise in the heat. Doing so will help retain fluid, delay dehydration, and enhance endurance.
• In general, commercial electrolyte replacers are more about convenience than necessity. Real foods like olives, pickles, and crackers with cheese after a sweaty workout can work as well as a commercial product. You just need to plan ahead and buy the salty foods so they are available readily.
• Rowers who sweat heavily might lose about 500 to 700 milligrams of sodium in an hour of vigorous exercise. While a sports drink is handy during exercise, real foods offer more sodium afterward. (Eight ounces of Gatorade offers less sodium than a slice of bread.) Some options for replacing sodium losses include: beef jerky, string cheese, broth, and salt on food.
• In a study with subjects who drank either whole milk, skim milk, orange juice, or a commercial replacement solution, the beverages that retained fluids best were whole and skim milk. That’s because milk has a strong electrolyte content and rehydrates better than a low-electrolyte beverage (i.e. plain water). Carbs, along with electrolytes, further stimulate rapid fluid absorption. For post-exercise recovery, chocolate milk is an excellent carbelectrolyte choice. Plus, it offers protein to repair and build muscle. Most important, it’s yummy. Let’s drink to that!
TRAINING
Stepping Up Your Fitness
Develop your pedestrian habits by commuting on foot, hoofing it to stores instead of driving, striding up the stairs, or strolling during phone calls
Low-intensity volume establishes the base of the pyramid on which to build your speed work for racing. The foundation of fitness is training consistently and taking quality strokes.
Rowing longer sessions is the most sportspecific way to build volume, but limiting factors are the time available and fatigue of the back and legs.
A simple way to add training minutes to your day is by increasing your step count. No warm-up and cooldown are needed, and it’s low-impact, providing mobility and relief to your lower back after being in the boat.
Steve Fairbairn, the Australian rower who became an influential rowing coach at Cambridge University in the early 20th century and is regarded as the father of modern rowing, included walking in his training programs and had his athletes trek 20 kilometers on weekends.
Develop your pedestrian habits by commuting on foot, hoofing it to stores instead of driving, striding up the stairs, or strolling during phone calls. Carve out half an hour a day to follow a trail or relax in a park.
A conversational pace is enough to gain benefits, and you can increase the physical demand by adding hills, bounding skistep style, or increasing your cadence. When traveling, walking is an alternative to rowing and can be done easily and pleasantly in town or country.
Need an indoor variant? Set a treadmill on an incline and press the start button.
Keep, Cut, or Rethink?
Questioning the assumptions underlying what we’re doing ensures that we’re growing. Doing things because that’s how they’ve always been done makes us stagnant.
After the final finish -line flag drops and the last shell is off the trailer, coaches often are left wondering, “What just happened?”
We’re flooded with thoughts of what worked and decisions we’re still secondguessing. Often, this means tweaking the training plan, reorganizing selection, or changing travel logistics. These are important and necessary adjustments, sure, but they’re also surface level. To make changes that are going to change outcomes next year, we need to go deeper.
In the 1970s, Harvard professor Chris Argyris defined the concept of “doubleloop learning,” In this approach, decisions are made by questioning the underlying assumptions or goals, not just the surfacelevel issues. Single-loop learning would lead a coaching staff to ask whether to change the fall racing schedule to compete at one head race instead of two. Using doubleloop learning, a coach instead would ask, “Should we be racing in the fall at all?”
This can be challenging, uncomfortable even. It forces you to question practices and approaches that you may not even realize you were engaged in. And that’s exactly why this is where the real difference is made.
To get the most out of these year-end reviews, I’ve found it useful to break down things into three categories:
Keep Doing
These are easy. These are the practices and philosophies that are working for you and your team unequivocally. Give credit where credit is due. Maybe these are things you’ve been doing for a while and know work consistently. Maybe these are things that you revamped this year. In any
PHOTO: LISA WORTHY.
MARLENE ROYLE who won national titles in rowing and sculling, is the author of Tip of the Blade: Notes on Rowing She has coached at Boston University, the Craftsbury Sculling Center, and the Florida Rowing Center. Her Roylerow Performance Training Programs provides coaching for masters rowers. Email Marlene at roylerow@aol.com or visit www.roylerow.com.
Etta Carpender stepping up at Nathan Benderson Park.
case, recognize what’s making a positive difference and stick with it.
Remember: This is for you as much as for your team. So if you took a new approach to managing logistics or prioritizing your workload and it worked, note that and carry it into next year.
Cut Out
This is what you know didn’t work for you and your team. No matter how well-intentioned, if that longer warm-up or those mandatory one-on-one meetings didn’t produce the desired results, ditch them. Time and energy are finite. Spend them on what’s going to win races, move team culture forward, and make life easier for everyone.
Rethink
This is the most difficult, and most important, category. This is where you need that double loop, where you need to go one
layer deeper.
You may be tempted to say, “The team needs more rest. Let’s move the start of practice from 6 a.m. to 6:30.” But the more powerful question is, “Why are we practicing in the morning to begin with?” Is this really the ideal time for optimal performance? What would we gain, and lose, by trying to practice in the afternoons on occasion?
This particular example isn’t easy. For years, I tried to move practice times and found both the culture and schedule of the school made this a less-than-ideal solution. But it was still a good question to ask and made me more convinced we were doing the best thing.
By questioning the assumptions underlying what we’re doing, we’re ensuring that we’re always growing. By doing things a certain way because that’s how they’ve always been done, we grow stagnant, and so does our performance. Double-loop learning
allows us to evolve and thus become an even better coach, mentor, and leader.
When the time comes to sort through this, don’t go it alone. Block out a good chunk of time, at least a full day, with the other coaches on staff to go through the year and categorize things— keep, cut, or rethink.
The best coaches I know aren’t just making small tweaks each year. They’re revising, rethinking, taking big swings. They’re unafraid to challenge systems, even the ones they themselves have built.
So when your season comes to an end, give yourself some time for reflection and then dig in with passion and courage. Ask the harder questions. And be brave enough to answer them
MADELINE DAVIS TULLY, competed as a lightweight rower at Princeton and on the U-23 national team before coaching at Stanford, Ohio State, Boston University, and the U-23 national team. Now a leadership and executive coach, she is the founder of the Women’s Coaching Conference.
U.S. National Team coach Casey Galvanek addresses the men at Nathan Benderson Park.
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DOCTOR ROWING CON’T FROM PAGE 66 >>>
movement and the boat moves truer.
There are other reasons for putting a “bucket” in shells. Some coaches find that having the person in the bucket (the rower closer to bow) puts subtle pressure on the bucketed rower, forcing him or her to keep up with the rower to the stern. It may feel a bit uncomfortable at first but it seems to make that bow-ward person get on it more quickly. It’s a bit like being in the back seat of a car when a longlegged person in the front moves the seat back. You are uncomfortable and want to move. It’s a way of squeezing a bit of extra “move” out of the person behind.
There’s one downside: Rowing by pairs during warmups and drills while everyone else sets the boat is a nuisance because with the bucket oars so close together, unless the person not rowing moves on the slide, the oars will clash.
At my school, kids call it “the magic
bucket.” They swear that once a coach shifts away from a standard rig to a bucket, the boat begins to fly.
We seem to be entering the heyday of bucket rigs. At the Paris Olympics, four of the six boats in the men’s four finals were rigged Italian, including the USA gold medal and Great Britain’s bronze.
Like everything in rowing, however, what really makes a boat go fast are the rowers, not the equipment. Conventional alternating rigs still win races. But an Italian rig is worth trying, especially if you notice that your boat is having difficulty going straight.
Is there a magic bucket in your future? Why not give it a try?
DOCTOR ROWING, a.k.a. Andy Anderson, has been coxing, coaching, and sculling for 55 years. When not writing, coaching, or thinking about rowing, he teaches at Groton School and considers the fact that all three of his children rowed and coxed—and none played lacrosse—his greatest success.
DOCTOR ROWING
ANDY ANDERSON
The Italian Motorcycle Engineer Behind Buckets
Bucket rigs are back in style. At the Paris Olympics, four of the six boats in the finals were Italian rigged, including the USA gold medal men’s four and Great Britain’s bronze.
There’s a lot of interest lately in alternative rigs: Italian rigs, German rigs, Russian rigs, and battleship rigs.
At the Big Ten Invitational at Nathan Bendersn Park in Sarasota last month, my well-traveled editor sent me a photo of the University of Michigan women who were aligned in a triple bucket–port stroke, seven and six starboard, five and four port, three and two starboard, port bow.
When asked why this unusual setup, coach Mark Rothstein said, “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
Perhaps he was being too modest. They did win their flight.
Although that particular rig seems pretty wild, it’s been around actually since at least 1958. I have a photo of an Italian eight rowing in that exact lineup at the European championships in Poznan, Poland. And German rigs, usually with five and four on the same side, were popular with Karl Adam’s eights.
A way to visualize what makes a boat wiggle is to look at the math of the seats in a four.
No discussion of bucket rigs, as they are known commonly, can be complete without digging into their origins. It was a motorcycle engineer at the Moto Guzzi factory in Mandello del Lario near Como, Italy, Giulio Cesare Carcano, who in 1956 watched a coxed four from the company’s rowing club and saw that it had a hard time going straight.
Carcano thought that instead of having stroke and bow on opposite sides of the four they should be on the same side with a pair in the middle together. He sold the company’s rowing team on the idea, and the first crew to row with this configuration won the 1956 Olympic gold medal in the coxed four.
But what was a motorcycle company doing with a rowing club? Canottieri Moto Guzzi had been formed in 1929 with the aim of promoting sports and recreation among its employees and local residents. Oarsmen from Moto Guzzi already had won gold in 1948 at the London Olympics, but the rig for which they would become famous didn’t appear until Carcano’s bold idea in 1956. In its 87 years, oarsmen from the company-sponsored club have won 22 European and world championships, another 80 Italian titles, and 10 Olympic gold medals, plus a silver medal and five bronze medals.
What’s the reason for an Italian rig? Carcano had observed that a shell does not travel totally straight. This is most obvious in a pair. Because of leverage differentials stemming from proximity to the bow, the bowman will outpull the stroke at the beginning of the drive and the stroke outpulls at the finish. The boat wiggles slightly on each stroke even if it goes straight basically; Carcano observed that this also happens in a four. To minimize the wiggle, he put two and three on the same side. Sure enough, with most crews, the boat will go straighter.
A way to visualize what makes a boat wiggle is to look at the math of the seats in a four. If you add up the numbers on each side of a conventional alternating placement in a four, you have four and two equaling six, while one and three add up to four. But in an Italian rig, four and one together equals five, and 2+3 = 5. If the numbers add up equally, it cancels out the wiggling
