All,

Here is a great article on rowing sent to me from Larry Laszlo (Liverpool coach
and US Rowing referee). For all you rowing enthusiasts, I believe you will find
this interesting.

I hope your summers are going well!
 
-Bob Garofalo
Girls Varsity Coach - FM



----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Larry Laszlo <Larry_Laszlo@...>
Sent: Monday, July 20, 2009 9:43:32 AM
Subject: NY Times article

Forever Rowing Upstream 

Unbeknownst to even the most rabid sports fans, one of America’s oldest
and most storied athletic disciplines is pursued daily on a nearby river,
lake or bay. Thousands of people power racing shells, narrow boats 26 feet
to 60 feet long (depending on the number of rowers, from one to eight).
Some row slowly and methodically; others push themselves to their physical
limit, the long heavy oars hitting the water up to 45 times a minute,
their muscles tortured and their lungs burning.

It’s understandable if you haven’t noticed: Rowers frequently start at
5:30 a.m., before most of us leave for work. What’s surprising is how
ignorant we are of big-time regattas.

Even for a non-Olympic year, this was a busy season. Last weekend in
Lucerne, Switzerland, U.S. rowers finished fourth among 37 countries
competing at the third of three World Cup regattas. On the last Saturday
of June, 21 titles were awarded at the 138th U.S. Rowing National
Championships on Mercer Lake in New Jersey. Earlier that month, the
University of Washington men took first at the Intercollegiate Rowing
Association National Championships in early June; Stanford University
women won the NCAA championships in May.

Results made few newspapers and rated nary a second of ESPN coverage.

“That’s a problem for us,” conceded Glenn Merry, head of U.S. Rowing, the
sport’s national governing body, in a phone interview. “Right now we have
maybe 150,000 who regularly participate in a sport out of a population of
300 million. To most Americans, we’re just not relevant.”

This is sad for a sport with a rich heritage. Rowing was the first
American collegiate sport, predating football in 1852 by 17 years. College
teams won gold medals in eight consecutive Olympics from 1920 through 1956
in the men’s eight, the most prominent event.

That early success, hard won by crews from such schools as the Naval
Academy and Yale, earned rowing a wholesome image. But today’s
multibillion-dollar sports machines are driven by stars, money and
violence. A team sport with no professional league, rowing has been
ignored by television—the fan’s conduit to sports. Yet U.S. Rowing
estimates that 85,000 people now row competitively, up from 32,000 in
1986; an additional 65,000 row recreationally. Occasionally races draw
crowds: Boston’s Head of the Charles regatta claims an attendance of
300,000 over its two days each October.

While high schools and colleges form rowing’s core, the new growth is
aided by community rowing clubs. They are everywhere where there’s water:
Boulder, Colo. and Alexandria, Va.; New York City, Chicago, Oklahoma City
and throughout Canada.

One of the busiest is Community Rowing Inc. on Boston’s Charles River, a
nonprofit organization that helps its 1,560 youth and adult participants
row at introductory and competitive levels. CRI began in 1985, when
Harvard coach Harry Parker opened his facilities to new rowers. It offers
classes for a fee to anyone and community outreach free to more than 200
teenage girls from the Boston area—“a third black, a third white, and a
third from all over,” according to CRI.

“Once the sport realized that the perception was the only way to get into
the water was to attend an elite college, people worked really hard to
change that,” said director Bruce Smith from the new CRI boathouse.
“Community rowing exists because a bunch of those elite people said we’ve
got to open the doors of this sport.” Rowing’s image as a sport for the
wealthy and white troubled U.S. Rowing enough to create a new position,
inclusion manager, and hire Richard Butler in May. His exact duties are as
yet undefined, but he might start by examining the work of CRI.

At 5:30 on a recent Friday morning, dozens of boats propelled by a diverse
group of rowers left the CRI dock: women in the four-oared shells with
coxswain—a nonrowing on-board coach who steers the boat—and men in their
four, each rower with a single oar, all members of the competitive groups;
women just learning in their eight-person shells, and lots and lots of
scullers, singles and doubles and quads—boats with one, two or four
rowers, each with two oars. They glided up river and down river, under the
bridges of Boston, nearly silent except for the occasional correction of a
coach from an accompanying motor launch.

Other Boston boathouses offer learner programs, part of a nationwide
effort to popularize rowing. But increased numbers have not translated
into Olympic success. Rowing is our third-largest Olympic team, behind
track-and-field and swimming, but it produced only three medals in 2008,
compared with 31 for swimming and 23 for track and field. The U.S. Olympic
Committee blames an emphasis on big boats, reasoning that eight rowers
could conceivably win medals in three or more smaller boats.

“They asked what it will take to move the other events forward,” according
to Mr. Merry, making it clear that the USOC uses funding for leverage. “If
we weren’t willing to make more of an effort in the other events, they
would have to put more money into another sport, like sailing. We’re
working on that.”

But U.S. Olympic problems are not limited to a division of effort. Because
rowers traditionally start in high school or college, even the best don’t
reach an elite level until their late 20s. This pushes the strenuous
training of advanced rowing up against studies and career, causing many to
quit. The dropout rate for freshman rowers is as high as 90%.

Collin Buesser, with high-school experience and a family tradition of
rowing, left Northeastern’s crew after his freshman year in 2008. “We
trained two, three hours every morning starting at 5:45 and then another
two to three hours in the afternoon,” he said. “I just couldn’t balance
all that with nine hours of homework.”

Plenty do manage, however. They put in their hours at college and clubs
dedicated to rowing. One of the oldest is the Riverside Boat Club, just
down the Charles from CRI. Its 210 members pay $550 a year and often row
11 times a week, training to compete against other clubs and some of the
nation’s best at national championships.

“It’s almost like it’s this closet subculture,” said Riverside trustee
Kate Sullivan one recent morning as early rowers took to the water. “On
the one hand, it’s too bad. Then again, it isn’t.”

For some rowers, anonymity is part of their bond.

—Mr. Rozin writes about sports for the Journal.


Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved