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FEATURES
UK rowers win three golds and a silver in five events, U.S. PR3 mixed four wins silver.
BY CHIP DAVIS
Mega Worlds Paralympics
U.S. wins a single gold in under-19 and under-23 races but in senior World Rowing Championships extends a five-year gold-medal drought.
BY CHIP DAVIS
Rowing on the Small Screen
Livestreaming regattas to attract viewers and boost the sport is becoming more common and necessary. But it must be done professionally.
BY MADELINE DAVIS TULLY
DEPARTMENTS
25 QUICK CATCHES
News John and Phoebe Murphy Retire
World Rowing Indoors
RowBuffalo
57 TRAINING
Sports Science Lessons From the Paris Olympics
Coxing Fall Housekeeping and Other Chores
Best Practices Recruiting Pet Peeves
Fuel How to Eat Like the Champions
Training Rowing in Rough Water
Coach Development Know Thyself 14 From the Editor 66 Doctor Rowing
FROM THE EDITOR
CHIP DAVIS
Yes, It’s Expensive—and Worth It
In an age when everything is experienced through screens, rowing must embrace high-quality video storytelling. “
If my associate AD saw only the online broadcast of this [national championship regatta], there’s no way he’d approve the expense of our program,” is what the head coach of a top rowing university told me this spring.
He’s right—and that’s an existential threat to our sport.
My daughter got excited about rowing, finally, not through the hours of rowing videos playing in our house over the years but by watching coverage of Olympic sculling on NBC. We can’t wait another four years to excite the next kid.
Everyone, from executive decision-makers to the next kid to try rowing, experiences more through screens increasingly than in person. It’s why Rowing News makes all of our content available now digitally. It’s expensive to do well, even as technology—and the opportunity to do it poorly—get cheaper.
In 2018, informed by experiences at the 2016 Olympic Games and having seen up close professionals work at the 2017 World Rowing Championships, several Rowing News colleagues and I spent significant time, money, and energy looking into what it would take to bring that level of video storytelling to domestic regattas like the IRA. The short answer: a lot.
About $100,000 per day in 2018 dollars was our conclusion, which tracked with what the best-in-class video presentations of Henley Royal Regatta and the World Rowing Championships cost at the time.
Yes, that’s a lot of money—about $125,000 in today’s dollars—but not out of line with what our community chooses to spend on other expenses commonly found at regattas. Two eights and a four cost that much. The SUVs and luxury cars found in the parking lots approach that cost. The four-year cost of attending the private schools and colleges racing at the regatta are multiples of it. Even some head coaches are finally being paid more than that figure.
If borne by the crews at, say, a 50-school, three-day regatta as an added expense, the cost—$7,500 per school—is not an easy sell. So a financial solution is not so simple.
Still greater complexities and experiences inform the current state of live video coverage of our sport, as Madeline Davis Tully explains in her feature “Rowing on the Small Screen,” beginning on page 50 of this issue.
Just because it’s hard to do well (just like rowing) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make every effort to do it better. And since important decisions will be made by those who experience the world through screen time, we must.
Both the athletic director who decides which sports get cut and the kid looking for her new sport will do so by looking at their screens, and they need to be shown just how great rowing is.
LETTERS
Too Much Caffeine
In “Better Rowing Through Food Science” by Nancy Clark in the July issue, the section about caffeine states: “Athletes can take caffeine in the form of pills (three to six grams of caffeine per kilogram of body weight; 200 to 400 milligrams for a 150pound athlete) …”
The reference to three to six grams appears to be an obvious typo; that much caffeine would be dangerous, perhaps fatal. The correct dose would be three to six milligrams per kilogram of body weight, as is reflected in “200 to 400 milligrams for a 150-pound athlete.”
If you check with the author, I’m sure she’ll want this corrected in the interest of accuracy and safety. Nancy Clark is an exceptional resource for your magazine, one of the best sources of scientific information for athletes about nutrition and well-being.
Mike Malak Woodbridge, Va.
Potent Pause
Doctor Rowing received the following letters from two coaches who are students of the sport, both coincidentally named Gregg.
In my column about the micropause, I didn’t mean to imply that the pause is a new thing; it was new to me. Both letters point out, rightly, that it has been around for decades.
I recommend looking at the YouTube videos of Drew Ginn and the Dutch. It’s a good thing to think about.
Dear Doc,
As regards the micropause, I believe it was a Harvard JV oarsman in the 1960s who forced the pause on his rocking and rolling crew to create some discipline. The crew got very fast, and by 1967 all Harvard crews were using what came to be known as the “Stop & Shop” finish.
When Kris Korzeniowski arrived from Poland by way of Canada, he thought Harry Parker was all wrong. Many years later, he apologized and adopted it as well.
Dave O’Neill’s Texas crews have a decided gather. Steve Gladstone’s crews don’t use it, but instead have a strongly defined drop of the hands at the finish, essentially serving the same purpose.
For a few years, I included a history of the pause in an annual lecture to the CRI coaching course. It is not a new British thing.
Gregg Stone
Cambridge Boat Club
Full disclosure: I have detested the micropause since its beginning. I like your bicycle-chain analogy. I hold up the 1996 Dutch eight as how I want my guys to row, and they row like the bicycle chain, particularly in the YouTube clip: “Holland 8 training.”
I am curious whether you have drawn the same conclusions as I regarding micro (sometimes macro) pause. Basically, I can see it working for elite men who pull in the 5:40s and are quick through the drive and thus have time on the recovery to manage the inevitable rush that comes with it. But for weaker people, I think all it does is create rush, poor steady-state rowing, and holds them back at high rates. I find it can be used as a drill effectively for emphasizing a technical concept, but not something I want to incorporate as part of permanent technique.
The gather concept isn’t new. It dates back decades. In recent years, it was repopularized by Drew Ginn, in a muchviewed social media post around 2011 titled “Will it make the boat go faster?” Drew explains how they are trying to maximize run. Clearly based on his success, he fully understands and applies the concept and makes the boat go faster. It works for him, most definitely.
Ginn was an elite rower, pulling in the low 5:40s. He could lever through the water pretty quickly with good drive mechanics, which of course he had. If he is rowing at 20 strokes per minute, and can get through the drive in 8/10ths of a second, that leaves him 2.2 seconds to parse out the entire recovery.
A micropause could be incorporated with time left over still to execute a
controlled, not-as-rushed recovery. Now, contrast that with a weaker oarsperson who lacks drive mechanics and is also assigned to row at 20, and is more like 7:20 for a 2K erg. They may spend more like 1.5 seconds on the drive, leaving them only 1.5 seconds for the rest of the recovery. Throw in a micropause and they need to rush the rest of the recovery to stay on rate. Throw in some indirect catches and you’re looking at a sloppy mess from the coaches’ launch. So this is a huge difference in ratio, rooted primarily in their physical capacity and ability to apply pressure.
I remember, too, when “fast hands, slow slide” was all the rage in the 1980s. It would minimize time around the back end so the slide could be controlled more.
Seeing the 1996 Dutch crew changed how I conceptualized the stroke, and I eventually landed on what you call the bicycle-chain analogy—smooth, fluid, with no big, sudden movements any place in the cycle.
When coaching this, I refer to moving the handle around the release as “continuous hands.” The handle(s) keep moving steadily, no gather, not super “fast hands,” just continuous. You get the best of both techniques this way, reducing check and promoting boat run through patience.
Gregg Hartsuff
Head coach of men’s rowing University of Michigan
New Sport in a Medieval Port
The World Rowing Coastal Championships were the first of two World Rowing events on consecutive weekends in Genoa Italy, followed by the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals. The emerging discipline of coastal rowing makes its Olympic debut in Los Angeles in 2028 in the form of Beach Sprints.
PHOTO: LISA WORTHY
Coastal Columbus
Adverse weather was no match for the 2024 World Rowing Coastal Championships in Genoa, Italy, as organizers moved racing up by a day to avoid it. Seven boat classes of men’s and women’s solo, double, and coxed quads, plus a mixed double, raced over 4km of open water.
PHOTO: LISA WORTHY
Truly Open House
In mid-September, the Saugatuck Rowing and Fitness Club in Westport., Conn., offered free rowing lessons to juniors and adults.
“It’s important that people know that our rowing program is open to everyone and that we are not a private club,” said Saugatuck’s Linda Kavanagh.
“People feel there’s too big of a commitment to registering for such a program, so we’re hoping these free lessons provide people with a sneak peek into what is offered as a fitness-club member as well as a rowing member or student.”
PHOTO: MAXEX PUBLIC RELATIONS
Washington, USA
Thursday, Feb. 6 to Saturday, Feb 8, 2025
The Women’s Coaching Conference serves all female rowing coaches, providing attendees with actionable education and community building to ma ximize their current positions and advance to the next step in their careers. The mission of the WCC is to educate, connect, and inspire emerging and established female coaches across the sport. The Winter ‘24-’25 conferences feature top-tier, professional presenters including leadership coaches, athletic directors, and leaders within the rowing community and beyond.
For more information, and to register for the event, visit wccconference.com Space is limited.
QUICK CATCHES
End of an Era at Brown University
The Murphys retire after 40 years of exceptional success coaching women’s rowing.
Brown University women’s rowing coaches John and Phoebe Murphy have announced their retirement after the most successful 40 years in collegiate rowing.
“Being part of Brown women’s crew has been a huge part of our lives, but the time has come to retire and give others a chance to lead this incredible team,” said the Murphys in a joint statement.
“We will miss the great racing and all the exceptional people we raced with and against who made our job so exciting. While we will certainly look back, we also look forward to cheering on future teams’ accomplishments. We will miss the
boathouse, the Seekonk [River], and most of all, all the Brown students we have had the privilege to coach. We are always rooting for you.”
The Murphys led Brown to every NCAA championship regatta in the 27-year history of the event, winning seven times. Before the inception of NCAA rowing in 1997, Brown women coached by the Murphys won three IRA championships and the first women’s “Triple Crown” of Eastern Sprints, IRA, and the National Collegiate Rowing Championship.
The Murphys coached Brown to nine Ivy League championships and 10 Eastern Sprints varsity-
Rowers to Vie in February Indoor Championships
Virtually
The 2025 World Rowing Indoor Championships, presented by Concept2, will take place over the last two weekends of February virtually.
The top 150 competitors in each gender and weight category per continental time zone who submit times during the open-qualification period from November 2024 through January 2025 will be invited to enter heats, conducted across three continental time zones. Finals will be broadcast live during European evening hours.
John and Pheone Murphy.
QUICK CATCHES
eight wins. In 2022, Brown became the first American crew to win the Island Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta.
Between them, the married couple has been awarded more than 30 different coach-of-the-year honors and is already in the Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
“John and Phoebe Murphy have had a profound impact on our campus and in the world of rowing,” said M. Grace Calhoun, Brown ‘92, the Mencoff Vice President for Athletics and Recreation.
“Their sporting achievements are extraordinary but they pale in comparison to their invaluable role in shaping generations of student-athletes who have graduated to lives of meaning and success. We could not be more grateful for their leadership.”
Calhoun announced that John Murphy will be succeeded as head coach by Tessa Gobbo, a 2013 Brown graduate who captained the women’s crew and has been an assistant coach at Brown for the past three years.
While she was a Brown assistant coach, the Murphys helped her become the best coach she could be, Gobbo said, including imparting this hallmark axiom: “Keep it simple and don’t talk too much.”
Gobbo, a 2016 Olympic champion in the women’s eight, won two gold and one
silver medal at the three World Rowing Championships leading up to the Rio Games. She credits the intense, pumpedup training environment cultivated by the Murphys for lighting her competitive fire.
She also cites John Murphy’s invaluable advice when she attended her first U.S. National Team selection camp: “Be low maintenance.” This year, Gobbo was inducted into the Brown Athletic Hall of Fame.
Friendly and kind, the Murphys cultivated crews that were fiercely competitive and often beat larger rivals with more highly regarded recruits through the intensity with which they typically raced.
While neither secretive nor aloof, they had “a powerful sense of their own mission” as coaches, said Paul Cooke, the coach of Brown’s men’s rowing team for the past 24 years.
Cooke arrived in Providence as a freshman oarsman two years after John Murphy began coaching the Brown women.
Commitment is the word Cooke used to describe the Murphys, recalling that they were “always aware of being competitive.”
“It’s hard to imagine Brown rowing without them,”
Cooke said.
John Murphy began his coaching career in 1976 at Cal-Berkeley, where he was responsible for the men’s novice crew. He continued to coach the men’s novice crew in
1977 and 1978.
In 1979-80, Murphy coached the women’s novice crew at the University of Washington, with the first novice eight going undefeated in the Pac-10 and claiming the West Coast Championship.
Murphy returned to Cal-Berkeley as the novice women’s coach in 1980, winning the Pac-10 West Coast Championship in 1981. His 1982 and 1983 crews were silvermedal winners, and his 1984 crew was the undefeated national champion.
John and Phoebe have three children— Jack ‘11, Penelope, and the late Patrick D. Murphy—and they reside in Barrington, R.I.
In addition to the NCAA championships, their IRA and Cincinnati championship results, combined with second- and third-place NCAA finishes, mean that over the past 40 years, more often than not, Brown University, under the coaching of John and Phoebe Murphy, concluded the season on the nationalchampionship podium.
Although they bear the official title of the Brown University Loyalty Chair for Women’s Rowing John Murphy and Gratitude Chair Associate Head Coach Phoebe Murphy, they are known universally, and will be remembered always, as Brown women’s rowing. CHIP DAVIS
Email your best rowing images to photos@rowingnews.com for a chance to be published. Images must be 300 dpi, and a minimum size of 4” x 6”.
NOVEMBER 30, 2024
19 JANUARY 2025
Fabulous Las Vegas
In Buffalo, Summer Rowing Is Back
With RowBuffalo, Buffalo Scholastic and West Side have created something new, disruptive, and victorious
Three years ago, a pair of oarsmen from Buffalo upset the favored U.S. National Team pair to win the 2021 USRowing Summer National Championship U19 event.
Rival Buffalo coaches R.J. Rubino of Buffalo Scholastic Rowing Association (BSRA) and Ryan Ficorilli of West Side Rowing Club had joined forces to return Buffalo summer rowing to its prior glory and with the upset victory they knew they were on to something.
“It’s the old rowing scene getting its juice back,” said Rubino—thanks to
CLUBS
RowBuffalo, which he called “disruptive and new.”
RowBuffalo is the summer program that operates out of Buffalo Scholastic Rowing Association’s Patrick Paladino Memorial Boathouse on the Buffalo River. After adopting the name in 2023, RowBuffalo continues Buffalo Scholastic Rowing Association’s summer successes, racing at various USRowing summer championship regattas and Canadian Henley. The summer roster has grown from 35 athletes to over 100 in three years.
At this summer’s 140th Royal Canadian Henley Regatta, North America’s premier summer event, RowBuffalo won six events, proving that Buffalo rowing is back. Earlier in the summer, RowBuffalo won the men’s youth eight and defended its 2023 title in the men’s U17 coxed four at USRowing’s RowFest in Oklahoma City. Esther Littlefield and Sophie Pirigyi captured RowBuffalo’s first women’s national titles, winning both the U23 and senior women’s pair by large margins.
The senior eight victory at Canadian Henley was the first for a Buffalo crew since 1956. The crew sped down the course in a blistering 5:33 (Great Britain won the
RowBuffalo hoisting the Craig Swayze Memorial Trophy.
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Paris Olympics in 5:22), finishing ahead of Mendota Rowing Club in second by open water and local powerhouse, St. Catharines Rowing Club in third. Calgary, Western Ontario, and Vesper rounded out the final field.
The crew—coxswain Teddy Hibbard, stroke Peter Spira, Lars Finlayson, Wilder Fulford, John Wright, Preston Darling, Jackson Cheetham, Nathanial Sass, and bowman Collin Hay— came together from Harvard, Penn, Cal, Stanford, Los Gatos Rowing Club and Canisius High School and have rowed on U.S and Canadian national teams.
The win continued a three-year streak by men’s eights, including the lightweight eight in 2022 and the championship eight in 2023. RowBuffalo also won the U19 men’s eight, the U19 men’s coxed four, the championship men’s pair, the U23 lightweight men’s straight four, and the senior lightweight men’s dash eight.
Since 1912, West Side Rowing Club has been the epitome of Buffalo rowing. The storied club dates from Buffalo’s most prosperous era and has been redeveloped repeatedly, including relocation to accommodate a sewage-treatment plant in the 1920s, destruction by a 1975 fire,
and the 2007 construction of the Fontana Boathouse, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (originally for the University of Wisconsin). Located across town, BSRA had been a separate part of the Buffalo rowing scene before the advent of RowBuffalo.
A fifth-generation Buffalo resident, Rubino is a redevelopment project himself, of the athletic sort. Originally an ice hockey player who “liked the hitting and checking better than the goal-scoring,” Rubino rowed at Buffalo’s Canisius High, on the U.S. Junior National Team, and at Mercyhurst College before a back injury forced him to hang up his rowing trou.
“Most great coaches aren’t happy with how their rowing careers went,” Rubino told the Buffalo Rising podcast.
Now Rubino has earned his way back to the sport, with the growth of BSRA and RowBuffalo enabling him to shuck his “corporate job” and coach and organize rowing full time.
CHIP DAVIS
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One of a kind property offered at $4,500,000 $3,500,000 Fully Furnished and Equipped See: ondinevt.com for more information
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RowBuffalow’s senior eight at Royal Canadian Heney Regatta.
THE BRITS DOMINATE
UK ROWERS WIN THREE GOLDS AND A SILVER IN FIVE PARALYMPIC EVENTS.
Great Britain dominated the 2024 Paralympic regatta, winning three golds and a silver from five total events in Paris on the Vaires-sur-Marne course. The U.S. PR3 mixed coxed four won silver, behind the British and their 14-year unbeaten streak.
The U.S. PR3 mixed double won their B final for seventh overall. Australia, with Nikki Ayers and Jed Altschwager holding off a challenge from Great Britain in the event, won Australia’s firstever rowing gold. Israel’s Moran Samuel in the women’s PR1 single was the only other non-British gold medalist.
Aussie Erik Horrie, after finishing fourth initially, was upgraded to a bronze in the men’s PR1 single sculls. Italian rower Giacomo Perini was disqualified for allegedly having a “communication device” —a mobile phone—in his boat during the race.
PHOTOGRAPHY
BY
MIMMO PERNA
STORY BY CHIP DAVIS
Previous page: Gregg Stevenson (stroke) and Lauren Rowles (bow) won the PR2 (formerly known as Trunk and Arms) mixed double sculls at the Paris Paralympics, one of three gold medals for Great Britain. Rowles is now a triple Paralympic champion, having won gold at both Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 in the PR2 mixed double sculls with Laurence Whiteley. Stevenson served as a Royal Engineer Commando before suffering a traumatic injury in 2009, which led to a double leg amputation
This page: Israel’s Moran Samuel won the women’s PR1 single, the event considered to have started Para rowing over 20 years ago. Samuel, who has competed on the international elite level since 2011, led Norway’s Birgit Lovise Roekkum Skarstein (silver) and France’s Nathalie Benoit (bronze) to the line in one of the closest finals of the Paralympics
Next page: The U.S. PR3 mixed four of coxswain Emelie Eldracher, Alex Flynn, Gemma Wollenschlaeger, and Skyler Dahl won the silver medal at the Paris Paralympics. The young crew—average age 21—briefly led the field at the start of the A final before Great Britain took over. The British crew set a world best time of 6:43 in their heat before winning a fourth-straight Paralympic gold in the event.
Romania, UK Top Medal Tables At Mega Worlds
U.S. wins a single gold in under-19 and under-23 races but in senior World Rowing Championships extends a five-year gold-medal drought.
St. Catharines, Ontario—home of the Royal Canadian Henley Regatta—hosted all three World Rowing Championships at once on Martindale Pond in late August.
The U.S. won a single gold medal in each of the under-19 and under-23 championships but by winning only a silver medal extended a senior World Rowing Championship gold-medal drought dating to 2019. Host country Canada was completely shut out, winning no medals.
Comprised of 41 events across three typically separate World Rowing Championships, Mega Worlds featured 14 under-19 events, 21 under-23 events, and six senior events. Combined in an Olympic year, as they were in 2016 in Rotterdam, Mega Worlds gives national teams and World Rowing a single destination in a year when they must travel also to the Olympic and Paralympic regattas.
Romania topped the under-19 medal table with four golds. Italy won six total medals, three of them gold, while Greece also won three golds out of four medals total. The U.S. landed sixth on the U19 medals table, with four medals altogether, all in coxed sweep events: a gold in the women’s eight, a silver in the men’s eight, and bronzes in both coxed fours.
Great Britain topped all nations in under-23 events, winning five golds and a bronze. Germany also had a remarkably successful regatta, winning four golds, a silver, and three bronze medals. The U.S. was sixth on the medals table, with a gold and four silvers.
Ireland and Italy tied atop the senior Worlds medal table with a gold and a bronze each. The silver medal in the men’s lightweight quad landed the U.S. tied with Paraguay and Peru in eighth.
While the Olympics and under-19 Worlds have achieved gender equity in number of events, under-23 and senior World Rowing Championships have not, with a combined 15 men’s and 12 women’s events
The U.S.men’s under-23 coxed four of coxswain Iliad Izadi, bow Leo Bessler, Braden Porterfield, Miles Hudgins, and stroke Joshua Diggons—coached by Treveor Michelson— won gold by open water over Italy, France, Australia, and Germany on the Canadian Henley course in St. Catharines, Ont.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LISA WORTHY STORY BY CHIP DAVIS
The U.S. women’s under-23 coxed four of coxswain Carly Legenzowski, bow Olivia Bachert, Olivia Meskan, Jordan Freer, and stroke Anna Garrison won silver behind New Zealand and ahead of Italy and Canada at the 2024 World Rowing Under 23 Championships, the best finish for the U.S. since 2018.
The lightweight men’s quad of bow James McCullough, Casey
Ian Richardson, and stroke
won the sole U.S. medal, a silver, at the senior World Rowing Championships. Mexico won gold, less than four-tenths of a second ahead of the U.S.
Howshall,
Jasper Liu
The U.S. eight of Carly
and
won the World Rowing Under 19 Championships. Coach Caitlin McClain’s crew had an open-water lead at the 1,000-meter mark and crossed the finish line more than five seconds ahead of Great Britain in second place.
Brown, Lauren Dubois, Charlotte Jett, Claire Van Praagh, Cecily Shaber, Lia Nathan, Emily Tierney, Delaney Lundberg,
Lucy Herrick
The U.S. women’s under-23 eight of coxswain
Zoe Tekeian (Virginia), stroke Margot LeRoux (Princeton), Kate Kelly (Virginia), Joely Cherniss (Princeton), Dahlia Levine (Brown), Natalie Hoefer (Notre Dame), Kathryn Serra (Harvard), Aine Ley (Dartmouth) and bow Hannah Smith (Tennessee) won silver behind Great Britain.
The U.S. men’s under-19 eight of Keenan
Heinz, Taeden Landa, Bailey Foster, Ori Radwin, Tyler Murphy, Kyle Fox, Fran McGrath, Hugh Ryan, and Michael Kain finished second to Great Britain to win silver ahead of Germany (bronze), New Zealand, France, and Canada at Mega Worlds.
ROWING ON THE SMALL SCREEN
Livestreaming regattas to attract viewers and boost the sport is becoming more common and necessary. But it must be done professionally. Henley and Syracuse are showing how.
STORY BY MADELINE DAVIS TULLY
Across the country today, it’s not uncommon to see a media launch or two and a drone trailing college crews down the racecourse.
The Head of the Charles began livestreaming in 2012, and the Henley Royal Regatta made the leap in 2015. Last spring, all Intercollegiate Rowing Association and USRowing-run regattas began livestreaming on Overnght, while numerous colleges compete weekly on ESPN+ and various conference networks.
Not long ago, livestreaming was rare and largely homespun. College dual races, when covered at all, were filmed from a coach’s phone and posted live on Facebook or Instagram in all their grainy, bumpy glory.
Things have improved dramatically, but “rowing is in its infancy as far as livestream goes,” declared Lindsay Shoop, the sports commentator and Olympic gold medalist who called the rowing events at the Paris Olympic Games for NBC.
There’s still a long way to go before all rowing events of consequence are covered, and covered well. Limited budgets, inexperienced announcers, and the indifference of those in power result in broadcasts that fail to convey the excitement of the races and the effort and achievement of the rowers. And in an age when an event hasn’t happened unless it’s available on video or through digital media, this puts our sport at risk.
Getting high-quality rowing broadcasts on the air is not a vanity project or the purview of only the most prestigious events and best-funded teams. It’s everyone’s responsibility to promote high-quality coverage of rowing at every level to grow the sport by making it accessible and enticing.
The first step in providing quality rowing coverage is to commit to doing it. The Stewards of the Henley Royal Regatta had discussed broadcasting the regatta for decades, wondering, as Matthew Pinsent, four-time Olympic champion and Henley Steward, put it: “We can watch the Olympics. We can watch, on occasion, the world championships. Why not Henley?”
The cost, complexity, and technical challenges, however, were daunting. Eventually, the previous chairman of the regatta, Mike Sweeney, decided to explore what was possible and invited production companies to advise the regatta what it would take to do it well.
In 2015, Henley debuted its regatta coverage on YouTube, live and for free around the world. It’s been a resounding success, setting the standard for rowing broadcasts and featuring the first-ever live drone coverage of a sporting event.
That same “why not us?” attitude is what led Syracuse University to produce the highest-quality dualrace coverage in the States.
In 2018, the athletic department’s production team approached Dave Reischman, head coach of men’s rowing, and proposed providing live coverage of their dual race against Wisconsin. As Reischman recalled, the video team, led by senior producer Kristin Hennessey and engineer Tom White, said, “Coach, we can blow this away. We want to set the standard for how a collegiate dual race is done.”
And that’s precisely what they did. Several factors enabled the crew at Syracuse to back up their assertion. The athletic department, led by athletic director John Wildhack, bought into the importance of covering all sports and doing it well.
“We’re here to develop the whole student athlete— academically and physically—and to provide that support and structure,” said Hennessey, summarizing the department’s philosophy, and that includes all athletes—from big-time sports like football to nonrevenue generators like rowing.
In addition to this philosophical buy-in, Syracuse benefits from the expertise and financial support of the ACC Network, which has an in-house unit responsible for live sports coverage. This means that top-tier equipment and the professionals who know how to use it are available to the Orange.
The broadcasts benefit also from the presence of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, the communications and journalism school at Syracuse, which is ranked consistently among the top in the U.S. and has produced such sports-broadcasting stars as Bob Costas, Marv Albert, and Mike Terico.
Students and staff from Newhouse contribute to the livestream, giving it a professional polish, complete with in-studio commentators, coach interviews, feature packages filmed weeks in advance, and on-screen graphics that explain clearly what’s happening in the race.
Six cameras covered the Wisconsin race (the production crew wanted more but were covering two other events on campus at the same time), and a satellite truck streamed the video feed back to the on-campus studio, where the broadcasters called it.
Production is completed in house, with costs covered by the ACC Network. The athletic department spends about $7,500 on salaries for camera operators and other hourly workers on site creating the broadcast.
The greatest obstacle to creating top-tier rowing coverage is money. For example, Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester, Mass., host to dozens of regattas each spring, does not have a finish-line camera because of budget constraints.
This can and does lead to major errors in regatta coverage, as was the case last spring when the men’s varsity eight final at Eastern Sprints was called definitively, and incorrectly, for Princeton on the livestream when in reality Brown was victorious by a tenth of a second.
The call was made as the camera, positioned on shore well ahead of the finish, lagged behind the racing, making it impossible to get a clear angle of the shells as
they crossed the line.
Meager financial support is a complaint heard in boathouses and regatta headquarters across the country. Many athletic departments balk at committing the funds to cover smaller sports.
“Especially with the changes going on in the NCAA,” Hennessey said, “it’s challenging to divert funds, resources, and time to non-revenue-generating sports. And that’s sad.”
Even at the biggest and most well-funded events in the rowing world, the financial commitment required for livestreaming races is huge. That’s what kept the Henley Stewards from exploring broadcast options seriously for decades.
Henley’s membership model enabled the storied regatta to make the leap. Its 7,000 members, all of whom pay an annual subscription, provided the resources to shore up Henley’s infrastructure, including the racecourse, the boat tents and grandstands, and, since 2015, the livestream.
A subscription model is becoming the norm in sports as event organizers seek to offset the costs of broadcasting. Last spring, most IRA and USRowing events were livestreamed behind a paywall on Overnght.
Gary Caldwell, the outgoing IRA commissioner, believes the arrangement will improve coverage. When announcing the extension of their partnership through 2030, Caldwell said of Overnght: “Their dedication to delivering outstanding content and enhancing the viewer experience aligns perfectly with our mission to promote collegiate rowing.”
Henley decided finally to invest in livestreaming because the Stewards were concerned about having the story of the regatta—its heart, drama, and meaning— told by others. Coverage on TV and in print tended to focus on the pomp.
“There’s a dress code, there are lots of hats, there are lots of blazers. It’s a bit of a social scene, and it’s very posh,” Pinsent said. “Coverage used to be rowing in the background and lots of people watching rowing dressed up in the foreground.”
By producing its own coverage, Henley was able to put the focus squarely where they wanted it—on the racing.
“The rowing, the racing, and the athletes are the front of the picture,” said Pinsent of the current broadcast, “and the finery, the color, and the traditions are the backdrop.”
The broadcast has given Henley “an added luster, an added appeal,” Pinsent said.
“And I don’t think there’s an accidental relationship between the number of entries we have and the appeal that we have globally.” (In 2024, a record number of international crews entered the regatta.)
At Syracuse, the quality and content of the broadcasts have attracted the attention of former and future Orange, as well as their supporters.
“People want to feel good about the program, and when they see your guys race and you’re competitive,
“THE ROWING, THE RACING, AND THE ATHLETES ARE THE FRONT OF THE PICTURE.”
“THERE ARE LOADS OF NEW SPORTS COMING IN, AND WE NEED TO BE TAKING LESSONS FROM THEM.”
MATTHEW PINSENT
they appreciate the effort we go to to get it done,” Reischman said.
Result: improved fundraising over the past several years, including a significant donation from an alum in 2019 after the first full ACC Network coverage of a dual race.
Parents of current students have embraced the broadcasts, and families of foreign rowers unable to watch regattas in person appreciate being able to see their children race live in a professional presentation.
Recruits, too, value the exposure, making rowing for Syracuse more attractive. Races witnessed by no more than a couple dozen spectators at Onondaga Lake, including those in the shells, are now broadcast around the globe to people who are rooting for the rowing team and donating money to support it.
The name of the game is eyeballs, and for rowing, the matter is becoming urgent and existential, at both the college and Olympic level.
As a sports journalist for the BBC, Pinsent is aware of trends in the sporting world and warns that rowing “needs to stay as high up the pecking order as we possibly can. Otherwise, we stand a chance of becoming less relevant. And that’s really dangerous.
“We should be in the top 10 of Olympic sports in terms of coverage and buzz and profile and excitement. I’m not convinced we do the best possible job at that.
There are loads of new sports coming in, and we need to be taking lessons from them.”
Whether it’s an on-the-water interview with athletes just across the finish line or mic’d up coaches in the boatyard and on the bicycle path, there are many ways to attract and engage more viewers.
“We need people who watch rowing only once every four years to tune in and say, ‘That was so amazing to watch. What a great product. I really felt like I was swept up in it!’” said Pinsent.
“How many people are standing around the water cooler the next day saying, ‘Did you watch that rowing race yesterday?’ That number could always be higher, and we want it to be higher, and we need to guard against that number dropping.”
Today, that means covering races professionally, not with inexperienced and volunteer commentators.
“People think it’s easy, and it’s not,” Reischman said. “It’s really tough to announce a race and try to appeal to everybody.”
Experienced commentators like Martin Cross make an event more exciting through enormous preparation and legwork. He speaks with coaches and athletes in the boatyard and on the bike path before the regatta begins. He spends hours researching lineups, collecting past results, and looking for interesting story lines on social media.
When he was invited to cover IRAs last spring, Cross created his own database by looking at lineups from earlier in the season, previous IRA results, and roster stats on each rower. He arrived at the regatta the Tuesday before racing began and walked the boatyard, introducing himself to coaches and crews and getting to know them and their stories.
“It’s a real challenge to pick out one person’s story and to have that one person on the screen and to somehow morph that into telling the story of a race,” Cross said.
Because Cross lacked updated lineups for each crew, he contacted coaches the night before racing. Similarly, Shoop emailed coaches before the Big Ten Invite, asking for information to help her get to know their teams better.
Coaches eager to improve coverage of their events would do well to emulate Syracuse’s Reischman. He and his coaches met with the production crew weeks before the Wisconsin race. They went out on the water to draft a game plan for race day and plot the best camera angles. The day before the races, coaches cut back brush and shrubs on shore to ensure ideal sight lines for the cameras. They made sure the broadcast crew had a quality launch, big enough to fit equipment that could keep up with the races.
“If people see how much you’re willing to do,”
Reischman said, “they’re willing to do as much themselves.”
More than anything else, those in the rowing community need to have the vision to see what’s possible.
In his video commentary breaking down the 2023 IRA and NCAA live broadcasts (available on RowingNews.com), Texas coach Dave O’Neill challenged regatta organizers, especially at the NCAA, saying, “We can do a better job” than distant drone shots that fail to show individual athletes and their extraordinary exertion. These aerial views, which look like they’re shot from the Goodyear blimp, he said, don’t convey any sense of the precision and intensity as the top collegiate rowers vie to finish first with the national title on the line.
Echoing the question the Stewards asked themselves a decade ago, Reischman wondered, “Henley can do it. Why can’t we do that at the IRA?”
Lessons From the Paris Olympics
All the successful rowers showed the typical U-shaped race profile—a fast first and fourth 500 meters and slower and constant speed in the middle 1,000 meters.
One could get philosophical when thinking about the constant cycle of training and racing. Compared to ball sports like baseball, where athletes often compete several times a week for months at a time, leaving little time for training, we rowers are known for putting a lot of time into preparing for our short races.
On the other hand, baseball athletes get a lot of feedback from their games— their strengths and weaknesses, what parts of their game worked and didn’t. They also get a lot of information about their opponents.
In comparison, we rowers get very little race information about ourselves and the competition. It’s very rare for teams to compete frequently against each other either on the national or international
level. In fact, very few countries participate regularly in world championships, and in a given year, it’s unusual for countries outside of Europe to race in more than one international regatta outside of the world championships and the Olympics.
Club and college teams fare a little better, since they have the opportunity to meet certain opponents a few times during a season. If they’re preparing for a national championship, however, they may have the chance to meet competitors from their own region but rarely teams from the other side of the country.
In addition, every racecourse is different, and it’s often very difficult, if not impossible, to get detailed information from other crews. Usually, we have no information about the wind, water
temperature, and current—all factors that can affect rowers during different parts of a race. In sum, there are many unknowns that can influence race strategy.
By analyzing training data, we can gather valuable information about ourselves outside of racing. We can run test pieces and time trials with and without other boats, measure times, stroke frequencies, even force and power, as well as technical measures such as “slip” and “wash” or the timing of individual crew members performing certain parts of the stroke. But it’s impossible to simulate fully a competitive 2,000-meter race.
So what can we learn from racing?
Something about ourselves. Well-planned tests tell us how our training is going. Are we improving our
Simon van Dorp won the bronze medal in Paris.
SPORT SCIENCE
Back Issues are
TRAINING
strength, endurance, and technical and tactical skills? What specific measures are we confident we can achieve, such as a certain stroke rate or target speed? What weaknesses do we need to work on? Are our target stroke rates sustainable, and how does our speed compare to that of our opponents?
The most valuable learning is achieved by recognizing factors that have not gone well. Is the stroke rate too low or too high to achieve the best speed? Can we make some changes to the rigging to help us execute our race plan better?
It’s helpful also to study the top rowers in their most important competitions. With the Paris Olympics just over, let’s look at the performances of the best in our sport.
At first glance, the high stroke rates are striking. In his latest analysis, Valery Kleshnev calculated that the average stroke rate of all the finalists over the full 2,000-meter distance was 40.2 strokes per minute, and it was even higher over the first 250 meters. All teams explode out of the starting blocks with the highest possible intensity, and you have to be very skillful to achieve and maintain such demanding exertion.
Here are a few lessons from the Olympic finals:
* If you want to win a race at the highest level, you have to be in the lead at 500 meters or at least very close to the leading boat. The gold-medal winner was in the lead at the 500-meter mark in nine of the 14 finals. Of all the boats that were not in the lead at 500 meters but ended up winning the gold medal, the Croatian men’s pair was farthest from the lead at that point— but only by 2.54 seconds. All the other following teams that won eventually were less than half a length behind the leaders at 500 meters.
The lesson: If you’re not leading early in the race and want to win, you must stay close to the leaders the whole time. If you’re too far back, you won’t be victorious (see the men’s single below).
The few boats that sprinted into a much better position in the last 500 meters demonstrated unbounded effort. To do so, you must have a very special mindset, be physically and especially mentally strong, and able to overwrite the feedback from the accumulation of lactic acid.
* If you want to achieve the best result you can, it’s important to have a realistic
idea of what place to aim for. If you’re too conservative in the beginning, the race will slip away. If you’re too results-oriented or think you can outdo better teams, chances are good you’ll be disappointed and will have to settle for a poor result.
* Of the 84 crews in the finals, only two sprinted to a medal from a fifth or even sixth place. The famous Sinkovic brothers worked their way from fifth place at 500 meters and fourth at 1,500 meters to their third consecutive gold medal. But they had several things working in their favor. They could draw on a wealth of experience. They never trailed the leaders by more than 2.54 seconds (which means they were always in contact with the leading crew). They rowed in what was probably the least-contested race and won with the lowest percentage of world-best times of all 14 races. And finally, they surged ahead when their strongest competitors took a very bad stroke only meters from the finish line.
* The second boat that worked its way to a silver medal all the way from sixth place at 500 meters from the finish line was the single sculler Yauheni Zalaty, who competed as an individual neutral athlete, having raced for Belarus at U19 and U23 Worlds. At 1,500 meters, he was 5.7 seconds behind the second boat and yet managed, in the race of his life, to cover the last 500 meters in 1:36.60—a feat he’d never achieved before.
This was the second-fastest fourth 500 meters ever rowed in an Olympic final, only a few hundredths of a second slower than Xeno Müller when he won the gold medal in 1996. In this part of the race, the individual neutral athlete was 2.4 seconds faster than Oliver Zeidler, the dominant gold-medal winner of the race, and more than six seconds faster than any of the other scullers. He benefited from the exhaustion of three scullers (from The Netherlands, New Zealand, and Greece), who seemed to go out too fast and had their slowest 500 meters in the last stage of their races.
All the successful rowers, including the aforementioned single sculler who raced as an “individual neutral athlete” (instead of for banned Belarus), showed the typical U-shaped race profile, with a fast first and fourth 500 meters and a more or less constant and slower speed in the middle 1,000 meters. VOLKER NOLTE
Fall Housekeeping and Other Chores
Taking care of your equipment and electronic devices now will ensure a smooth return to the water when racing resumes.
Whether your winter season is indoors or out, the end of fall racing is a great time to take care of your equipment so that it serves you well on the water. First and foremost is the care and maintenance of your CoxOrb, CoxBox, and other electronic devices, like SpeedCoaches. Problems with your CoxBox may not be your fault, but they can irritate your rowers and interfere with your ability to run a practice safely and effectively. Take steps to ensure that your
equipment functions properly.
“Make sure you’re regularly charging but not keeping it plugged in the whole winter,” said Jun Jeon, sports-performance sales manager at Nielsen-Kellerman. A good rule is not to charge the CoxBox or SpeedCoach continuously for more than two days.
Conversely, you also don’t want your electronics to sit untouched for months with the battery drained. Regularly charging and discharging the battery will help preserve its life.
“A lot of the troubleshooting or repair calls that come in are unfortunately the result of not keeping up with that charging,” said Jeon.
It’s also best practice to clean your CoxBox at least once a month (or biweekly if you row in salt water) and before it’s put away for any extended period. NK sells maintenance kits for the CoxBox, and you can also assemble your own. If your CoxBox is the newer style with three ports on the front, make sure to use the protective cap that came with the box whenever you’re on the water to prevent moisture from entering through the rightside Smart Connector port. Keep the cap on for storage as well.
Make sure your headset and wiring are coiled loosely and neatly for storage and travel and that you don’t lift or carry the box by the microphone cord when it’s in use.
“Be careful with where the microphone jack is,” said Jeon. “It’s where we handle it the most when we plug it into the CoxBox.”
When the microphone jack is handled gently, “there will be less static, and people will be more pleased with how the CoxBox sounds.”
Other coxswain housekeeping tasks worth mentioning:
Empty out the rest of your coxswain bag and replace wrenches, hardware, and tape that were used up (or went for a swim) during your fall season.
Clean and air out your waterproof gear and flotation suit, if you use one.
If you recorded your coxing throughout the fall season, label and organize your recordings digitally.
If your boats are de-rigged for the winter, note how each shell was rigged so you can help your coach and team re-rig efficiently.
With these tasks done, you’ve set yourself up to help yourself and your team get on the water smoothly when racing resumes. HANNAH WOODRUFF
TRAINING
Recruiting Pet Peeves
Be sure to fill out that recruiting questionnaire and submit your erg time.
Even with all that has been written about recruiting, college coaches still find many things they wish every prospect understood. Here are a few behaviors that frustrate coaches across the country. Consider these recruiting pet peeves and do yourself a favor by avoiding them.
When emailing a coach, sign your first and last name to every message you send. Even better, include your graduation year (2025, 2026) and affiliation (school or club). You’re not the only Isabelle or Jimmy they’re hearing from.
If the coach asks you to submit the university’s recruiting questionnaire, do so immediately. You can always email new information or update the questionnaire. Never refer a college coach to your beRecruited/CaptainU/NCSA online profile as a substitute for submitting the school’s questionnaire. Many athletic departments require coaches to communicate with prospects through their recruiting software and need the questionnaire to do so.
If a coach requests your unofficial academic transcript and/or test scores, make sure your name is visible on what you provide. Sometimes what you may download as a grade report doesn’t show your name. If you send this information as a link to a school website, make certain that it’s not password-protected and the coach can access it. Also, send the materials to the coach; college coaches typically cannot review what goes directly to the admissions office.
If a coach requests video, send footage of you pulling hard, not paddling around. Coaches want to see how you behave at race pressure and race rates. The ideal: you and your blade(s) fill the video screen. If the video shows you in a team boat, identify clearly which seat you’re rowing. Keep video clips to less than 30 seconds.
And of course, everyone’s favorite: Do not make excuses for your erg time. Telling
a coach that you “didn’t get the chance to test” or “can’t find an erg” makes you come across as unmotivated. Your peers who find ways to get more fit and demonstrate their fitness are getting the attention you seek.
You don’t need to pull a 2K. Most college coaches will accept the results of any erg test that your team does. When sharing erg times, send a picture of the monitor showing your time and splits. Coaches like this verification and seeing how you paced your piece.
Finally, ask questions rather than make assumptions. College coaches appreciate direct questions about the team, recruiting
If a coach requests video, send footage of you pulling hard, not paddling around. Coaches want to see how you behave at race pressure and race rates.
standards, and timeline. “What do I need to do to earn a scholarship/admissions support?” is much better received than “Will you give me a scholarship/support?”
The coaches also know more about the recruiting and admissions process than anything you’ll read on message boards. If you rely on internet gossip, you’ll get exactly what you deserve. The opinion of your peers is valuable, but it should not stand alone when evaluating your options.
Good luck with your college search and selection process! BILL MANNING
How to Eat Like the
Champions
Tour de France riders used to refuel minimally after the day’s race. Today’s riders consume plenty of carbs after each stage to speed recovery. Result: Fewer episodes of bonking and hitting the wall.
If you’re like me, you’ve been enthralled watching the Tour de France and the Paris Olympics. I found myself wondering about the strategies these high-performing athletes use to fuel their bodies before, during, and after extremely hard training sessions and competitions.
The webinar Fueling the Tour de France addressed my curiosity and solidified my observation that sports nutrition has indeed evolved into being a central component of the training and competing strategies of elite athletes.
In the past, Tour de France riders refueled minimally—perhaps a protein
FUEL
shake—soon after the day’s race. They waited until they got back to the hotel to eat three to four hours later. Today’s riders consume a significant amount of carbs right after each stage to speed up their recovery. Compared to their peers of 10 to 20 years ago, they also eat significantly more carbs. Result: They experience fewer episodes of hitting the wall, bonking, and becoming depleted completely. This hastens recovery; if you don’t dig yourself into a hole, you don’t need to dig yourself out of one.
Here are some interesting takeaways from the webinar that may inspire you to take a closer look at your fueling patterns, carbohydrate intake in particular. While you may not be a Tour de France cyclist, it’s likely you have the similar goal of becoming the best athlete possible.
• Tour de France losses are linked commonly to inadequate carbohydrate intake. While a cyclist may not win the tour in a single stage, he can lose it in a single stage.
• Fatigue related to training hard vs. fatigue related to underfueling is difficult to distinguish. Experimenting with eating more grains can help identify and resolve an underfueling problem.
• To optimize the availability of fuel (carbs) for muscles and the brain, rowers who train intensely should:
—carb-load a day or two before the endurance event.
—consume adequate carbs during the endurance event.
This will reduce the risk of bonking/ hitting the wall and will improve stamina, endurance, and overall performance.
• Ideally, each competitive rower has a meal-by-meal plan and day-by-day approach that offers high-, medium-, or lower-carb meals according to the demands of the day. That is, not every day requires a high-carb intake. For a Tour de France cyclist, flat stages require fewer carbs compared to mountain climbs, with further adjustments needed for heat, wind, and rain.
• While some high-level endurance athletes have a support crew that helps provide food and fluids during long training sessions and events, the cycling Team Sky has its own kitchen truck with three performance chefs who guide food intake during the Tour. The four main meals are breakfast, on-bike fueling, post-bike fueling,
and dinner. For rowers, the strategy is to surround your workouts with food.
• Overall daily targets are 2.5 to nine grams of carbohydrate per pound (five to 20 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram) per day to fuel muscles, more than 0.9 grams of protein per pound (two grams per kilogram) per day to preserve muscle mass, and minimal dietary fat intake (so athletes fill up on carbs, not fat).
• During hard efforts that last longer than 2.5 hours, the goal is to consume 90 to 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour. That’s about 350 to 500 calories from carbohydrates per hour—a lot more than most endurance athletes consume.
• Endurance rowers, take note: For a 150-pound (69 kilogram) Tour cyclist doing extreme work, nine grams of carbohydrate per pound (20 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram) translates to 1,350 grams of carbohydrate. That’s 5,400 calories just from carbohydrate alone—about the amount in a two-pound bag of uncooked white rice. No wonder Tour de France cyclists consume bowls of white rice for a pre-race breakfast!
• Consuming that much carb from food can be difficult. Hence, concentrated sources of carbs such as gels and chews can help athletes hit their carb goals.
• During endurance exercise, sports drinks facilitate the ability to consume 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour. Tour de France riders rarely go below 80 grams per hour. Endurance runners should choose hydration fluids that offer more than just plain water.
• Consuming a variety of carb sources enhances their transport out of the GI tract and reduces the risk of intestinal distress. Carb blends (such as sports drinks made with glucose + fructose) have limited variety, so don’t eat too much of the same commercial sports food. Standard carb-rich foods (banana, granola bar) offer a wider variety of carbs.
• Tour de France cyclists must train their guts to be able to digest and absorb up to 120 grams of carbohydrate (around 500 calories) per hour comfortably. In training camps, they do not only on-bike training but also gut/digestive training. They practice eating as they would for a race. Gut training can take years as cyclists increase their intake of carbs per hour gradually. Simultaneously, they test different products
they might want to use.
• Cyclists should plan to begin feeding early and for as long as they can manage if they know they’ll be unable to ingest much during the upcoming mountain climbs. Similarly, rowers who can’t eat much on race day should consider eating extra the day before.
• In the first 60 to 90 minutes of recovery, a Tour cyclist may consume cherry juice (carbs + antioxidants), quickly absorbed carbs, and a whey + carb recovery shake. When traveling back to the hotel, they eat a meal (such as salmon and pasta with extra salt) and sweets (cake, fruit). If they have a hard ride the next day, they eat and refuel as much as possible. At the hotel, they snack, have a massage, eat another dinner, and go to bed with a full belly.
• At the elite level, some endurance athletes practice carbohydrate periodization (training with depleted muscle and/or liver glycogen stores some of the time) for selected workouts at the start of a training block. “Sleeping low” (with low glycogen stores) and then training on empty (no pre-exercise carbs) a few times a week can enhance cell signaling and induce adaptations that can improve performance. These trainlow sessions get phased out as training intensity increases. (Note: Athletes not at the elite level should focus on the fundamentals of fueling adequately. No need to train low when there are easier ways to enhance performance.) Conclusion: Food is more powerful than many rowers think. If you have a hit-ormiss sports diet, think again. A sports dietitian can help you eat to win!
Sports nutritionist NANCY CLARK, M.S., R.D., counsels both casual and competitive athletes in the Boston area (Newton; 617-795-1875). Her best-selling Nancy Clark’s Sports Nutrition Guidebook can help you eat to win. For more information, visit NancyClarkRD.com.
TRAINING
Rowing in Rough Water
Loose shoulders let the arms absorb hitting the top of a wave, catching an edge, or adjusting the blade height on the recovery.
Training and racing in rough water are part of rowing. First, through coaching and drills, master stability, bladework, and power application on calm water. Over time, progress to maintaining your form in various degrees of difficult wind and waves.
Practicing in challenging water conditions will elevate your skill level, especially if you compete and train on water that is typically flat. The smaller the boat you’re in, the more refined your technique needs to be.
A major faux pas in bad water is tightening your shoulders, arms, and hands; the chop then travels to your upper body and disrupts your stability. Keep as light a hold on the oar handle as possible to allow the blades to stay at the proper depth during the drive and help you feel the water.
Loose shoulders let the arms absorb hitting the top of a wave, catching an edge, or adjusting the blade height on the
recovery.
After the release, be sure to lower the oar handles enough to clear the waves and carry the oars higher off the water during the recovery. Practice plenty of rowing with the blades off the water and tapping drills or strokes on the square to improve balance. Keep the entry light and intentional so you can feel the blade set before you drive.
When waves are of varied height and amplitude, the blade can miss the water, forcing you to hold your balance until the blade gets back in the water. Be patient and focus on placing the next entry.
Gaining experience in adverse situations (as long as they’re safe) will provide the lessons for learning to work with the water.
MARLENE ROYLE is the author of Tip of the Blade: Notes on Rowing. She specializes in training for masters rowers. Her coaching service, Roylerow Performance Training Programs, provides the program and support you need to improve your competitive edge. For information, email Marlene at roylerow@aol.com or visit www.roylerow.com.
Know Thyself
Football coach Pete Carroll’s core philosophy offers valuable lessons for rowing coaches as well.
On the surface, it may not seem like rowing and football have a lot in common. Perhaps rowing coaches and football coaches have even less in common.
On the collegiate level, football coaches are raking in millions of dollars, ensconced in their secure practice facilities, rarely putting in an appearance at any of those “mandatory” all-staff meetings for which the rest of us have to show up.
Similarities between the NFL coaching experience and that of our National Team coaches, for whom coaching an Olympic crew is often not even their full-time job, can seem essentially non-existent.
That’s why, over a decade ago, I was surprised to find myself devouring legendary football coach Pete Carroll’s book, Win Forever. And I’ve been even more surprised by how often I’ve returned to it in the years since.
I didn’t think of myself as a Pete Carroll fan when I picked up the book, but the success he had with USC and the Seahawks, making him one of only three head coaches ever to win a collegiate national championship and a Super Bowl, is undeniable.
My lasting takeaway from the book, and the reason I include it in the syllabus for the course on coaching that I teach at CRI’s Institute for Rowing Leadership, is how concisely Carroll articulates his core philosophy and the benefits he experienced by being able to do so.
There’s no long-winded back story or a pyramid hung up on the wall—just one clear idea: competition.
In the introduction, Carroll recounts how, after being fired by the Patriots in 2000, he was feeling lost and defeated. Inspired by another coaching great, John Wooden, who took 16 years to figure out his own immutable rules for success, Carroll set about defining his own.
He understood, as he says in Win Forever, that “one of the keys to success lies in knowing and believing in yourself.” And what Carroll knows is that he is a competitor. He is driven by a single thought: “to do things better than they had ever been done before.” And that’s how he decided to begin leading his teams.
It was shortly after defining this singular organizing principle that Carroll decided to leave the NFL and interviewed for the head-coaching position at USC. In the interviews, he unveiled his newly defined philosophy and, throughout that process, sensed a newfound confidence and belief in himself.
“I had never felt so prepared and wellequipped to deal with the challenges of taking over a program,” he recounts.
This, coming from someone who already had been coaching for nearly 30 years—four of them at the helm of an NFL team— speaks volumes about the benefits of defining and articulating your own guiding principles and values.
There’s no need to wait 30, or even 16, years to define your coaching philosophy. Think of what unimaginable successes Carroll or Wooden could have achieved if they had set about the work of articulating their values sooner.
Wherever you are in your coaching career, now is a great time to begin knowing and believing in yourself.
MADELINE DAVIS TULLY
BOATHOUSE DESIGN • ROWING TANKS • FEASIBILITY STUDIES • SITE ASSESSMENT
Rowing Projects at: Bates College • Bergen County • Brunswick School • Culver Academies • Episcopal H.S. of Jacksonville Foundry, Cleveland • Harvard University • MIT • Mt. Holyoke College • Princeton University
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and on the video monitor which focused on the bows, there they were up in the bow, leading the pack.”
Alie chimed in: “There is no one that I would pull harder for. Kay was my idol growing up, and while we may have had our little sibling spats—she flipped me out of the pair once— I wanted nothing more than to row as well as she could.”
“Alie raced in Tokyo,” Cindy said, “but there were no spectators allowed; it was heartbreaking not to get to be there to support her. But Paris was a dream come true. I was more nervous for Nick’s race than I was for any of mine. As we sat in the stands, we just savored the 15 years of watching them row.”
The Rushers live on Big Cedar Lake in West Bend, Wisconsin.
“We loved seeing the girls out rowing together in a pair as they used to go back and forth,” Jack said. The neighbors would get excited about it, too. When they started to row, we had a Peinert single, and Cindy started a friendly family competition, timing who could row out to Penny Island and back. I thought they would think it was fun, but I later found out that they said it totally stressed them out.”
When I spoke to Nick, he was still high from the Olympics. “I can hardly put it into words; there’s a great sense of fulfillment. And having my whole family there and knowing what it means— fantastic!”
Nick wanted to take issue with the whole “why not more Americans in college crews?”
“I probably see it differently than some people; I got to row with and against Olympians in college. If I hadn’t been rowing with international oarsmen at DOCTOR
Yale, I never would have improved the way I did. When I took my first 2K test freshman year at Yale, it was 6:23.”
In his years at Yale, Nick rowed in all five varsity boats, moving up through the ranks.
“Rowing with a gold medalist from New Zealand at stroke, me at seven, and an Australian medalist from the straight four behind me at six—well, those guys taught me as much about rowing as my coaches did.”
And how much did his erg improve while rowing at Yale?
To 5:58 at Yale, and now, with the help of the California Rowing Club, to 5:54.
What has rowing meant to the Rushers?
“It totally changed our lives,” Jack said. “For one thing, we would never have met.”
Cindy echoed this: “The people I have met and the traveling I have done—I never would have done any of that without rowing. It has been a really healthy focus for our family.”
“I’m so proud of both of them,” Kay said. “There’s never been a doubt in my mind that Alie and Nick would achieve their Olympic dreams, and it’s been one of my life’s highlights to watch and support that journey.
“I’ll never forget the day each of them made the team and called me. Nick’s is fresh in my mind because it was so recent—I started jumping up and down and screaming YESSS! It was amazing to watch Nick win a bronze medal, while sitting next to Alie and my parents. I remember grabbing Alie’s hand after the 1,500 and screaming that they were going to medal. I just knew it.”
Not that many families have four Olympians. Rowing has woven the Rushers together. There is a lot of love here—for rowing and for each other.
DOCTOR ROWING
ANDY ANDERSON
The First Family of Rowing
Meet the Rushers of Wisconsin—Jack, Cindy, Kay, Alie, and Nick—four of them Olympians, three of them medal winners.
In 2022, I attended a social event at the Cambridge Boat Club, and the talk, not surprisingly, turned to rowing. A stone’s throw from Harvard, a number of members remarked on the terrific crews that Yale had been boating.
“Sure, but isn’t it true that none of them are Americans,” said one old oar. Grumbling ensued about the sorry state of collegiate rowing in the USA. You’ve heard it before: We are a training center for other country’s national teams.
“I know of at least one American in that Yale boat,” I said. “Nick Rusher, whose parents are both Olympians. He rowed at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire and is now at Yale.”
While this didn’t exactly calm the roiling waters of dissatisfaction, it did get me thinking about a column.
I met Cindy Eckert and Jack Rusher back in the ’80s when both of them were National Team members. Cindy rowed at Wisconsin as part of their nationalchampion 1986 eight, and Jack had rowed in national-championship boats at Harvard in 1987, 1988, and 1989. Cindy won a silver medal in the coxless four at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, and Jack had won a bronze in 1988 in Seoul in the eight.
“It started with the excitement of running down the beach, watching Kay and Alie’s St. Paul’s boat win.”
That same evening at CBC, their daughter Alie was in the room, having returned from racing in the quad at the Tokyo Olympics, adding fuel to the fire of my column about the Rushers. I asked her if she would be willing to talk about her family and their rowing.
“You’d better ask my mom,” she said.
I emailed Cindy, who said they’d prefer to wait until Nick had finished his rowing career. I put the idea on hold. But with Nick’s own bronze medal in hand from Paris—he was two-man in the USA eight—the time seemed right to talk about this extraordinary family.
“We didn’t want to jinx Nick by talking about his quest for the Olympics,” Cindy explained. Nick had rowed in the U23 eight in 2021 and the Senior National Team eight the next year and still had a couple of years to go at Yale. Beyond that was a hope to go to Paris.
There’s a third accomplished rower among the children— Kay, the oldest child, who rowed at St. Paul’s and Stanford.
How did all three take to rowing?
“We never pushed any of them to follow in our footsteps,” Cindy and Jack agreed.
“All three of them went to St. Paul’s and fell in love with the sport.” Jack said, “The coaches there were very inspirational, and our kids loved rowing for them as much as I did.” (Jack rowed for Chip Morgan and Rich Davis, father of my boss at Rowing News.)
At home, the Rushers kept their medals in a drawer, and Nick says as a kid he never realized how rare it was to have both parents be Olympians.
“It was great having them both understand just how hard rowing is,” Nick said, “and how hard it is to make a team
I asked them to reflect on the highlights of their years as über rowing parents.
“It started with the excitement of running down the beach, watching Kay and Alie’s St. Paul’s boat win at the [New England Interscholastic Rowing Association regatta] in Worcester. Later, they also rowed together at Stanford. It was thrilling to see them together in the bow pair of Stanford’s varsity in the 2016 NCAA championships. They didn’t win, but they led the field for quite a while,
The Rushers in Paris.
