Rowing News | Why not start a rowing club?

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BY ANDY ANDERSON
PHOTO BY PETER SPURRIER

Summer is the perfect time to row, as are fall and spring. I guess winter is nice too in California, Florida or Seattle, but I’ve never experienced it there. At the end of our school season, kids who have taken up rowing often ask me, “Where can I row this summer?” If only it were that simple. Many of the top summer programs fill up early, and while their numbers are growing, there aren’t enough to accommodate all the rowers and coxswains who want to keep rowing.

Yes, there are rowing camps, usually held at colleges. But whatever anyone can get out of a week of rowing and training, it hardly compares to club rowing, where you can row and race. It is not easy to find a club with available places; most established clubs have their own members to look after. If you don’t live in a rowing center, you will have to find a place to live, which is not an easy task for a teenager. It’s not much easier if you’re a college rower.

There are development camps, of course, and for the crème de la crème, the U19 and U23 camps. But we need more summer rowing clubs. At the risk of sounding like I’m congratulating myself, I want to tell you about a rowing club that two coaches and I started and had a short but brilliant run.

In the spring of 1979, Burt Apfelbaum, who had rowed with me at Trinity College and coached at Mount Holyoke College, and I were talking about doing something different, something fun. What if he brought his varsity boat to Hartford and we mixed his athletes with the women I coached at Trinity? We sailed two eights, Holyoke ports with Trinity starboards, and vice versa. We made parts. The boats were going fast. The contestants have become friends. Everyone was excited. Burt and I noticed that the intensity level seemed higher than usual. The athletes wanted to impress their rivals. We were onto something.

About a week later, we spoke again. I remember Burt saying, “It’s criminal that these women have nowhere to go to keep rowing this summer. Well, why not expand on what we tried and start a rowing club? And take him to the NWRA Nationals to race? (The National Women’s Rowing Association was a parallel organization to the National Association of Amateur Oarsmen; in 1982 the two organizations joined forces and became USRowing, the governing body.)

Both of our colleges didn’t have enough athletes who wanted to row an extra month. So we asked Debby Ayers De Angelis, the UMass coach, to join us. Mount Holyoke was willing to house the women, and we could use the UMass docks and the boathouse at Amherst College. The coaches brought equipment from their respective colleges. The bulk of the athletes joined the three of us who were their coaches, and word of mouth attracted a few more. How we brought in women from Oregon, I have no idea. We needed a name. Our host institutions were all in the Pioneer Valley. The Pioneer Valley Rowing Association was born.

We had no budget. The athletes paid their share. The coaches coached for free. We rowed the Connecticut River twice a day in Amherst for three weeks. None of us had done much siege running. At a small university, you know your athletes well and it’s usually obvious who owns the varsity boat. But with athletes you don’t know, seated running helps a lot. It also gives athletes the ability to quickly learn who drives a boat forward. It builds confidence when you can say, “I won my seat race with Sue in the boat” or “When Rachel strokes, I can feel the power.”

Our goal was to carry heavy and light weight eights and fours. We wanted everyone to have two races. As we prepared to head to Detroit for the races, we were all happy with the rowing that had been done. It was not really possible to have a goal because we had no idea how we would position ourselves against the powers – women who had rowed for the United States, Yale, Wisconsin, Vesper and other programs legendary.

The heats went well. The elite four looked across the water at the start line and saw that they, the strangers, were racing on Lake Washington, whose stern couple had rowed for the United States the previous summer. Huge smiles just from being in this area. And incredibly, they won the heat. As we gathered the day before the final, everyone was smiling. All our boats had made the final. Our four elite coxswains had the race of their lives in the heat and finished fifth; of the six finalists, they were the only ones without a national team member. The eight was third. Our lightweight four won gold.

Our team chanted “PVRA,PVRA” at the launch pad and as they watched each other race. They were very loud. A coach told me it was unpleasant. We liked it.

I learned so much that summer working with great athletes and exchanging ideas with other good coaches. The following summer, we were even stronger, with women from across the country. This second year we won a bunch of events and the overall points trophy. After a few more years, the PVRA expanded to include men. But that first summer when we were completely green was awesome.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you have a boathouse or great gear. If you have talented, enthusiastic athletes and passionate coaches, you can have a summer rowing club.

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