I apologize to my British readers who are no doubt getting sick of my endless gripes about the NCAA. So, after griping about the NCAA, I will hark back to my Oxford days and gripe about the OURCs (the governing body for Oxford rowing - for those readers outside Oxford who don't know) and anyone else who tries to regulate rowing without a clue. Actually, the OURCs improved notably in my time in Oxford, but my epic name-calling disputes with Jon Haynes (head of the OURCs for several years while I was there) are probably still legend.
Besides the fact that the OURCs decided to get responsive during my time in Oxford - and even gave me a voice in re-writing the rules (and, much to my surprise, included some of my ideas in the re-write, some of which are still in place) - there is another crucial distinction between the NCAA and the OURCs: the people running the OURCs have at least a basic understanding of rowing, whereas the NCAA not only does not understand rowing but doesn't care to understand. This plays out in that the purpose of the OURCs is to govern rowing in Oxford; the purpose of the NCAA is to keep colleges from abusing their students in revenue-generating sports.
The item which caused the flap on r.s.r came up simply enough. A coach of a California program posted a reminder on the newsgroup that rowing tanks counted as training equipment related to rowing - the purpose being that the NCAA regulates the number of days per year women's rowers in the US may train under supervision, and that those days even include days off the water if tanks are used. In short, for any day a coach in the ice-bound north trained in a tank, that coach would lose one day on the water later this year.
The note may have gone unnoticed except by those to whom it was meant to be a civilized and subtle reminder, except for the fact that it included the additional NCAA rule interpretation that: "ergometers are not considered 'equipment related to the sport' and thus are permissible for conditioning."
So... the NCAA does not consider ergometers "equipment related to the sport." That little piece of idiocy right there should just about summarize why it was not safe to let the NCAA anywhere near rowing. Too late.
There really wasn't much to say about this interpretation on ergs, so that subject dropped. However it did serve to get everyone's attention. What we then discussed on the newsgroup was why the NCAA felt inclined to make certain rules.
Before the NCAA took over women's rowing, it was up to individual leagues to set rules for themselves. That meant there were local variances across the country (for example - coxswain weights). None of these variances made a whole lot of difference in terms of competition. One of the more controversial rules was in the EARC, the top collegiate league (Northeastern US Div I): no water practices on home water between the last Saturday before Thanksgiving and February 1st. This rule existed in part to benefit the northernmost crews which were iced in from mid-November until mid-March. Many crews started getting around the rule by heading South over vacations (a trend which barely existed when I was in college, but which is currently all the rage - even Harvard went south this year for the first time). I don't think this rule was much of a burden, however - as I have said many times before, if being on the water year-round gave any inherent advantages, California crews (not subject to EARC water-time rules or to ice) would have dominated this sport.
The idea was to level the playing field somewhat. If it were to level it completely, then the rule would have been November 15th-March 15th or something similar. But the purpose was clear, had to do with a modicum of sportsmanship, and really did not hinder training at all.
Enter the NCAA. The NCAA limits the number of days anyone can be on the water. The logic has nothing to do with the sport of rowing. The logic has everything to do with protecting athletes from coaches. Further evidence of this comes with the NCAA's rules on practicing during exam periods: no supervised practices are allowed. This rule exists to prevent coaches from requiring practices during exams - if they can't be there to supervise, then they can't require them. This also means that a rower who decides to erg on her own time cannot approach the coach and ask for a suggested work-out.
The message the NCAA is sending is clear: coaches cannot be trusted. That may be true in revenue sports, but I would like to think that rowing is a little classier.
I think back to college: practices during exams were never required. For those who wanted a break, the coach ran optional practices for anyone who showed up. Quite simple really, and the way I continue to run things (my program is not subject to the NCAA because we are club-status and not varsity-status). Hell, I remember countless times when a rower would ask the coach for study-days during the year and those would be granted. I myself took off half a week in the run-up to Sprints my Senior year, as did my stroke, both of us for academic crises. Our coach knew that we understood what effect this would have on our crew, so that if we were asking for the time off we really needed it. Well, we got ourselves squared away, returned to the crew, and won the championship over the crew which had wrecked our undefeated season just the weekend before we took our days off.
Happy rowers are fast rowers. Students must put academics first - that's why they go to college. Any good coach knows this. In rowing, with no professional future ahead (except for Steve Redgrave, the only long-term full-time professional rower I know of - who never went to college anyway), we really must stress academics. And stress it we do. it is part of our job as rowing coaches.
The NCAA is for the revenue sports. These rules protecting athletes from coaches have no place in rowing. A contingent of r.s.r wags disagreed. Some didn't like the regulations, but took the view that the NCAA is here to stay and has produced short-term benefits, so we might as well give up the good fight. I don't give up so easily.
I'm sorry, but I thought our sport was rather special. I thought it was the most important learning experience of my undergraduate career precisely because of all of its distinguishing attributes. I had been fortunate enough to do the sport in high school, but quickly realized in college that the sport thrived on people who may not have had that opportunity. The emphasis of the sport is on the athletes, and since this is a team sport in the extreme, the emphasis of the athletes is, in reflex, on the sport.
So, I became a rowing coach. Why? Because I wanted to give something back to a sport which had meant so much to me. Because I wanted to share my enthusiasm and allow as many people as possible to have the opportunity to experience even a fraction of what I had experienced - if not even more than I had. And I became a collegiate coach not just because that's where the most opportunities were but because I cared about _education_.
Yes, people should go to college for an education. Intercollegiate athletics complements what goes on in the classroom. It is not a surrogate for academics. It is not the reason to go to college in general or a specific college in particular. It is something to do at college to make college a more rewarding experience.
Academics must come first and foremost. That does not preclude success by any means. But the NCAA shows no signs of understanding this role of intercollegiate athletics, nor do - I fear - many of the college athletics departments which are sponsoring some of the so-called "new" women's programs (some do, many don't). Athletics has become a reason for college in its own right, ahead of academics. There is no thought of student welfare as students and as human beings.
Hence the large influx of money. Many programs now offer oodles of rowing "scholarships." Athletics scholarships are an evil that must be eradicated, as I have explained in a previous letter.
Money also flies around in other mysterious ways. I learned this week that there is one newly-minted women's varsity program which was given a budget of $40,000 a year specifically for clothing, a budget they must use up. I can't honestly think how the program's roughly 40 women can even spend that much on rowing clothing in one year (maybe if each of them wanted a different all-in-one for each day of practice?). For $40,000, of course, that same college could partially fund its men's team, which it refuses to do. When I was in college, we were a varsity-status program and the only piece of clothing we did not have to pay for was our first racing shirt each Spring. Other than that, it seemed obvious to me that I should buy my own college-issued jacket or sweatshirt.
But money has come to rowing. Money hasn't come for rowing, merely to rowing. And there is such a thing as bad money - it is corrupt.
Rowing seemed special to me in part because it has not been a sport traditionally prone to this sort of tampering. There have indeed been scholarship-giving programs, but they have not historically done well - at least while scholarships were rather limited and not at their current huge numbers. Scholarships were impractical in part because they reward the individual, and this was the furthest sport from individualism. Rowers have traditionally also been ahead of the curve academically. And most rowers start in college anyway.
I have gone on at length in previous letters about how the NCAA has messed around with many areas of this sport. Rather than belabor the point again, I will simply limit myself to showing disgust at the lack of respect the NCAA is showing for me and my rowing coach colleagues. This is a special sport, and I resent the insinuation that rowing coaches would exploit athletes if given the chance. We are educators. The NCAA has no clue about the true role and value of athletics as part of a college education.
I do not subscribe to the argument that unchecked coaches would demand too much time out of their athletes if the NCAA did not intervene. We have done just fine without the NCAA in this department for well over a century. Certainly there are coaches who have demanded too much time - but I would argue that they form the minority of successful coaches. Most coaches who demand too much find they lose athletes. Harvard, which has I believe the largest number of undergrads rowing and which has also been one of the most reliably successful programs in the last few decades, has had a 90-minute-per-day practice rule, for example, for many years. Coaches who care about their athletes would, I think, care about their athletes' complete well-being. It's fine to have athletes who practically move into the boathouse by their own choice, but I've known plenty of rowers who have done just fine in the sport on the minimum required practice time and 100% commitment even if they did not put in extra hours.
Maybe I am missing the point, but what makes me admire people like Harry Parker and Charley Butt and Liz O'Leary and so many other coaches I have known is that besides being great coaches of the sport, they truly care about their athletes as students and as human beings. If I am wrong about that assessment, then I might as well quit right now, because I am aspiring to emulate the wrong coaches.
I realize that I am not alone in my sentiments. I have named a few very select famous coaches whom I think we should all aspire to emulate. However, I think that the bulk of my colleagues do indeed aspire to be educators in some form or other, each in his own style. Some of us are good coaches and some of us are not so good - "good" here may refer to winning, but it more appropriately refers to educating. I can think of a ton of coaches whose crews never won but whose rowers would jump of cliffs if they asked them to - these are good coaches. Indeed, even Joe Burk, Rusty Callow, and Dad Vail only had a handful of dominant crews in their long careers, and they were three of the greatest of all time.
My point is that the NCAA insinuates that most rowing coaches are no better than all those classless NCAA football coaches; that we will abuse our students if given the chance; that we would not consider our students’ welfare. I am sure there may be some rowing coaches need to be restricted. But not most. And restrictions in this sport would be more effective if they came from the institution - if a coach’s athletes were all failing classes, or rebelling because they were miserable (I can think of a major rebellion at an EARC program in the 1980s), or raping and pillaging across campus - then the institution can step in against the coach. What the NCAA is doing is imposing an inflexible bureaucracy on everyone in order to control some theoretical coaches who may not even exist and who, given the sport, are unlikely to exist in any important numbers.
If I am wrong here, then I clearly misunderstand the sport of rowing and the value of collegiate athletics.
If a coach needs the NCAA to dictate how he or she should coach, then there is something fundamentally wrong with that coach - even if an NCAA championship were to come out of that program, there would still be something wrong with that coach. Harry Parker, Rusty Callow, Joe Burk, Dad Vail... the list goes on and on... these guys did just fine without the NCAA. They treated their athletes with respect, and their athletes learned great lessons from them. These are great educators - and the classroom has been the river.
I read an interview with Carm Cozza, the longtime Yale football coach, the year he retired. He was asked what his most cherished memory was in his long and distinguished career (which, had it been at a big-time football power would probably have resulted in several national championships). He said it was one of his athletes who went on to Oxford and a distinguished academic career, returning to New Haven to visit him and thank him for the "best class I took at Yale." One of the special aspects of collegiate rowing, as opposed to the revenue sports, is that rowing is full of fine coaches like this.
Incidentally, it is indeed possible to both have a doctorate and to become a rowing coach. I am not the only coach with various advanced degrees. Indeed, I would suspect (just a guess) that there are proportionally more rowing coaches in the US with advanced degrees (even excluding sports-related subjects such as physiology or similar) than there are in any other sport.
I think, as usual, to my years coaching in England which gave me a lot of perspectives on the sport which I would not have had I remained stateside. The Oxford Men's Heavyweights quite often take in random internationals doing graduate "degrees" such as the infamous "Diploma in Social Studies" (affectionately known as "DipSoc") which most Oxford colleges don't regard as a serious enough course to merit admission (hence the disporportionate number of DipSocs at places like Keble College). Oxford also has Rhodes Scolarships and other ways of getting in through the back door (not all Rhodies are free-loaders, but there are some, and some who row - it takes a lot to get a Rhodes Scholarship, but there are no real requirements to fulfill a degree once at Oxford - witness Bill Clinton, who never got a degree and is not unusual among Rhodies).
In contrast, Cambridge Men's Heavies have traditionally been mostly home-developed undergrads to Oxford's predominantly post-graduate crews. But a few years back, Cambridge Men's Heavies decided to offer up to two scholarships to rowers who had already been admitted on academic grounds but who needed financial aid. In 1996, Dan Topolski led the charge of "unfair" competition in luring "professional rowers," and Cambridge discontinued the trend. Yet it was the same Dan Topolski in the same year who also went around to Oxford colleges asking them if they would be willing to take some random Olympic rowers whom he might persuade to attend Oxford for a year to row. He did not have anyone in mind in particular, so he could not have been thinking of academic standards when he asked. Not surprisingly, many colleges said no. Some were bound to say yes.
Do we want American universities to turn into Oxford in this respect - full of professional rowers who go to class on ruse so they can row and with no opportunities for the bulk of people who hithertofore have filled the vast majority of seats in even the most successful collegiate programs? And note that Oxford's Men's Heavies have not been competitive with Cambridge for several years despite having supposedly superior line-ups.
Maybe we do. I don't. If I'm wrong, if I am coaching for the wrong reasons, if I am a lousy coach because I see myself as an educator who cares about the welfare of my students and thinks that any collegiate program should nurture its athletes even as it turns them into a fighting force, then maybe I'll find something else to do with my life. Heaven knows I could use the spare time, since I have a full-time life outside rowing and I coach because I find it rewarding in its own right.
I think that to have success in this sport requires a lot more out of people than most sports, mostly because of the team nature. A coach who views the complete person is more likely to produce happy rowers, who will in time become good rowers, who will be more ready for achievement in life.
Certainly, some coaches can bring in mercenary rowers and win. The bulk of the successful programs, however, are the ones who pay attention to their lower boats and to their novices, and are who willing to develop their athletes. This is how the Cambridge men’s heavyweights slay their supposedly superior Oxford opponents every year, to take an extreme example (although things might change with Sean Bowden coaching at Oxford now). This is one reason Harvard has been so consistently successful - it has more people rowing than any other college in the US.
I have seen many amazing high school rowers go on to college and not make good collegiate rowers. If they were on scholarship and worried that they would lose that scholarship if they quit rowing, they might keep rowing - but at what cost? Would they go fast? Have enough scholarships, of course, and this might be irrelevant - you’d only need eight people a year to pan out from those twenty-five. But what is the point of that? To have consistent success, a program must have athletes who want to row all four years, not who feel like they have to row all four years.
Yes, I believe in fast crews. But fast crews cannot be bought consistently; they must be made. And I think that most of my colleagues would agree that when we coach, we must do more than simply teach technique - we must coach the whole person if we want to get results. This is why intercollegiate athletics in general - and rowing especially - is often the most important class a student has in college, even if that student goes to college for academics (as everyone should).
I have been associated with programs which thought that winning was our birthright, down to programs that have had to crawl out of holes in the ground while the parent college tries to beat us back into the hole with a shovel. What connects all of these experiences is that the lessons of rowing are the same. And rowing is a great sport to learn about life.
Maybe the NCAA is a better way to learn about life. It certainly thinks so. I certainly hope not - but maybe the cynic says that I am wrong and that the NCAA teaches more about the real world and that I need to get out of the Ivory Tower more often.
But rules are designed to make competition fair. Coaches are supposed to look out for the well-being of their students. Let the NCAA make rules - if it must - but let those rules be sensible and let them not interfere with the education we coaches are supposed to be providing.
I promised I would return to the OURCs before I concluded this letter, so I will, briefly. My objection to them several years back was precisely because I felt that they had become overbearing and had lost sight of the fact that they were there to promote rowing not to restrict it. They had a lot of unnecessary rules, and they prowled the river looking for trouble. My first-ever encounter with a member of the OURCs committee (before I even knew there was such a thing) came when one long-time member stopped me on the bank and told me that the drill I was having my crew do was not a good drill. What I did with my crew concerned no one else - we were obeying traffic patterns and so forth - so why should the OURCs threaten to fine me for teaching my crew an unorthodox drill? If it makes us go slower, then I am obviously not coaching right and that is fine enough. I told her off, much to my crew's amazement since they knew who she was and I did not. But I got used to telling the OURCs off when I disagreed with their logic. I always felt they should just let coaches coach - that was our job, not theirs. If they wanted to be traffic cops, fine (there are tons of bad coxswains on the Isis). And if they wanted to oversee bumps racing, also fine. If that also meant establishing rules for eligibility and traffic, good. But that is the extent of things. (For those who remember, I was also an opponent of the flag system being any more than advisory).
When the OURCs returned to the issue at hand - fair rules for rowing at Oxford - they won my faith over. But they could do this because they were rowers who cared about the sport.
The NCAA can never reform itself in regards to rowing because it was not set up with rowing in mind. It was set up for an entirely different type of sport in mind. Ironically, by regulating rowing as though it were football or basketball, the NCAA is actually making the sport take on some of the bad aspects of the revenue sports - the very aspects that need regulation. The NCAA is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It has created a need for itself by creating problems that did not exist in any significant way before, just so it could claim that rowing had these problems which require regulation.
We must ask: why do we need rules? I say to create fair competition which will promote the sport and the collegiate experience of all who competes. The NCAA says it has rules to protect the athletes. The issue is not whether rowing tanks count the same as rowing on the water, or if ergs are considered rowing-related equipment. The issue is what the underlying logic is behind the rules.
Readers from Virginia high schools will no doubt sympathize. The Northern Virginia Scholastic Rowing Association has some of the stupidist rules in the country imposed on it by a bunch of pig-headed administrators who would feel right at home in the NCAA. There is so much rowing in Northern Virginia - the high school league has dozens of members - that the only thing keeping these programs back competitively is precisely the rules designed for other sports which have been imposed on rowing. The administrators hide behind academic logic, but again I would say rowing is exempt. Indeed, the most competitive high school league in the US - the New England Insterscholastic Rowing Association - counts many of this country's top private and public schools as members. As soon as the Northern Virginia administrators realize this, the caliber of school rowing in this region will skyrocket without hurting anyone's grades and, indeed due to the increased structure provided by properly run programs, may actually improve academic performance. Remeber: coaches are educators.
I'll stop now and will try to leave the NCAA alone for a few months at least. There's nothing I can do about it right now anyway other than complain loudly.