I did not expect to be heading a women’s program in this country any time soon. As Wolfsonians no doubt know, I used to be a big champion of women’s rowing in England. The way things worked out, I have not been involved in women’s rowing on this side of the Atlantic until now. Indeed, women’s rowing in the US is in a state of flux, and I am not sure if I am completely pleased with the directions it is taking. I figured I would observe developments for a few years before getting involved. But necessity has intervened.
Women in England would not recognize women’s rowing in the US right now. I’m not sure I do. My bottom line has always been that I care about the sport and will accord the appropriate amount of respect to anyone - men or women, novice or international, heavyweight or lightweight - who puts in the effort. I have never cared whom I coached provided they were willing to work for me within the bounds we set together.
Before coming to England, women’s rowing was never an issue for me. When I went to college, our women rowed out of an entirely different boathouse, so it would have been easy to see them as separate and maybe not equal. But their coaches were as phenomenal as the men's, their equipment the same, their drive to win the same. When we had home races on the same weekends we would go cheer for them and they would cheer for us. A large contingent of women used to come out to our Sprints (even to Saturday night Sprints) and we would go to theirs. We took as much pride in their accomplishments as they did in ours. Across the league I think we saw other programs behaving the same way.
I did not find that to be the case in England, which is why I became involved primarily with coaching women, feeling I could make a bigger difference there. I will not rehash at this time all my observations which made me reach my conclusions about the inherent chauvinism of the British Rowing Establishment (which is fraught with far too many problems to list anyway, attitude towards women’s rowing being only one). But I will say that I was disgusted by, among other things, the way some notable programs provided their women’s squads with inferior equipment, funds, coaching, and the like.
When I coached in England, I came up against some pretty chauvinistic attitudes. I once even coached for one club which operated as though it were a men's-only club which tolerated some women piddling around in boats. It did not matter to them that those women were very serious athletes, and had a tradition of winning (until the year before I started with them which was their first-ever losing season partly due to the fact that they had lost their long-time coach mid-year). This was a very establishment club, and I had a number of confrontations with the men. They claimed they couldn't afford to get us merely satisfactory equipment yet they could buy a new (third) Empacher for their men. They wouldn't even get the women hatchet blades (when I started the women didn't even have Dreissigacker macons - "wooden blades should be good enough for women!"). When we complained, they said they wouldn't let us rack our boats in the boathouse and they refused to take us to regattas on the trailer. The men also argued that women didn't need a professional coach because the men could coach them just fine (for free, but read "for sex" if you like). It came to the point that I was unable to work under these conditions, and my presence was actually a source of greater confrontation with the men, so I left after a couple of months. I don't believe they've had a good season since. I've got a million more stories and observations from my time in England. It angered me to no end. I was even quoted in the pages of American Rowing magazine accusing the British Rowing Establisment of ingrained chauvinism. That created quite a stir over there.
When I returned to America, I found the landscape here to be quite different than when I left it. In the South, that rowing backwater I now call home, as well as in isolated parts of the more-established rowing world, collegiate programs have started to treat men the way women get treated in those English programs which made me so angry. Women’s rowing also sold its soul to the NCAA (that nasty bureaucracy I mentioned in December’s letter). Yes, I still am a fan of women’s rowing. But I am first and foremost a fan of the sport and am not sure I like all these new developments.
In America, collegiate sports teams fall into two categories: club and varsity. Club teams are funded much the way all teams are in the U.K. - through dues/subs, fundraising, and sponsors. Varsity teams enjoy the full support of their university athletic departments, which means ample funding, training facilities, and other perks. No distinction is made when teams compete - we are a club-status program, but we compete mostly against varsity-status ones - but varsity-status programs have an easier time of it because of the support they get from their universities. Imagine, if you will, that some US college supported men’s rowing as a varsity sport and left women’s rowing as club. As long as there were sufficient interest by women at that university in rowing, then there would be a rightful outcry. Well, exactly the opposite is now happening in some places. Some colleges, predominantly in the South, have started promoting women’s programs without the corresponding promotion for the men. I fail to see how this is a good thing.
Part of the problem arises from current interpretation of US law. "Title IX" requires proportionate funding for men’s and women’s athletics at US universities. There is some dispute as to what it all means, of course, as is natural in a Common Law system with badly-written laws. When the Supreme Court refused to rule on a Brown University case last year, current trends in interpretation of Title IX were allowed to continue. But I think a case could be made for other readings.
The general interpretation results in women's rowing being a foil for men's football. That's a bit of a cop-out, and it is also an uneven exchange. Sure there is no women's football, but there are women's sports without men's equivalents such as field hockey. Anyway, American Football is a big financial drain for universities as it is. While most college sports teams don't pay for themselves either, football loses enormous amounts more money than any other, and that money is being disproportionately spent on a very small segment of the student population for little benefit to the university. A Division I-A collegiate football program, for example, can have up to (and usually has all) 85 full-scholarships. A professional team, by contrast, only has 56 players - so why does a college team need so many extra players, especially if they are getting special benefits costing upwards of $20,000 per player per year? That money could be better used funding a whole lot more sports teams and even recreational sports facilities. I do not condone the decision Boston university recently took in disbanding its football team entirely in order to do this (rowing was a big beneficiary of this decision) - rather, BU could simply have kept football but not used its scholarship quota. Plenty of teams at BU's level do indeed choose not to have athletic scholarships at all, including my alma mater. Hell, where I went to college we had the largest intercollegiate sports participation of any college in the US, including all the far-larger universities. In any given year, nearly a quarter of the student population competed in intercollegiate sports, and nearly 80% did intramurals (which we had in every sport from tackle football to rowing). We had 41 varsity sports, without the supposed benefit of a semi-pro football team (home attendance was usually under 1000 people). We had no athletic scholarships and yet we won national championships regularly in many sports. And, best of all, the athletics program was open to everyone and benefitted the student body and the university. So those who hide behind "football" are finding an unsupportable excuse.
Title IX is written in "gender-neutral" terms, that it to say it does not apply only to discrimination against women but to discrimination against either sex (for it to apply to one but not the other would be unconstitutional). By my reading, making one sex varsity without the other is strictly legal only under one of two conditions: first, that there is not sufficient interest in the sport by the sex not promoted, or, second, that the sport is not sufficiently established or competitive for the sex not promoted. Hence, Drake University could promote women’s rowing without men’s, because there was essentially no interest by men at Drake in the sport. If a sufficiently large men’s field hockey club developed at some university, that university could easily justify not promoting the program to varsity because there is virtually no men’s field hockey in the United States so competition would be non-viable. But rowing is a fully-established sport for men and women across the country, and if there is interest by both sexes, both halves of a program should be promoted together. This is what has generally happened and continues to be the norm in the Northeast (with a couple exceptions). Given the nature of this sport, there is much more interdependence between men’s and women’s programs than in most other sports. If there is sufficient interest by men and women to support both programs, then both should be brought up together.
It would make a very interesting law-suit, indeed, if a men’s program sued its university under Title IX for making only the women varsity. [Remember here that in my non-rowing persona I am currently working on projects dealing with constitutional theory, hence my interest is purely theoretical.] But such a suit would not really help the sport, either, because it would create animosity between men and women which should be avoided. It might also anger the University and prevent it from promoting the women’s program to varsity, and that would not help either. But it might at last get the Supreme Court to come down with a much-needed ruling on Title IX.
Having a program get only half-promoted is not necessarily a bad thing if it is done correctly. The only place I can think of that has handled this issue well is the University of Virginia, where Women’s Head Coach Kevin Sauer put forward as a condition on the women being promoted that the men also be taken care of. What happens there is really just creative accounting - the men are still officially club-status, but are what I would call a funded, if not varsity, program. But most women’s coaches in these circumstances have not had the class that Kevin has - or have simply been supplanted by the Athletics Department which has hired new coaches willing to toe the line. Some previously successful men’s programs have been gutted in the exchange.
Good rowing inspires good rowing. All rowing deserves support. A good women’s program can help inspire a men’s program as much as the other way around (happened at Wolfson when I was there). Having strong programs for both sexes will lead to better rowing on the whole. We train in a vacuum down here in Williamsburg. There is no rowing in this part of the world. Last year, I had to convince my novices that the sport was big, because they certainly didn’t see anything like that around here. The more good rowing that goes on, the better. And this is a prime sport for helping each other out. Petty antagonisms do not help make people faster, they rather slow everyone down.
So, I remain a great supporter of women's rowing. But, even more, I am a great supporter of good rowing in general. I don't really care about men v. women, heavy v. light, international v. novice. The sport benefits if we all benefit.
As I said in December, I will leave my critique of the NCAA until a future date when I have more perspective. However, I am sure that the NCAA does not understand rowing, and its involvement in women’s rowing is meddlesome. The fact that club-status programs do not fall under the auspices of the NCAA means that I do not have to deal with that organization directly. However, since most of our opposition does have varsity status, we do get to feel the consequences of the NCAA’s take-over of women’s rowing indirectly. Club-status programs do race against varsity-status programs in this country, according to ability, but with the NCAA refusing to recognize competitions with club-status opponents, it remains to be seen how far our women can go in the sport from here. This was another reason I did not expect to get directly involved in women’s rowing quite yet - I still wish to wait and see where women’s rowing and the NCAA go together.
At the moment, I will remain concerned. I will also gladly coach the women here, because it has been breaking my heart that I have been unable to attract a suitable head coach for them. They work hard without complaints, and are on the verge of making some big breakthroughs. For them to fail due to lack of coaching would be heartbreaking. Of course, I do have my prior obligation to the men, and I have no intention of letting that slip since they, too, are dedicated, committed, and only a year away from the position the women are at now. But this only underscores the nature of inter-dependency in this sport, as the two halves of the program are mutually supportive and can use each other to promote their rowing and their general development as human beings. And it is the development of students as athletes human being that makes coaching so rewarding, and which makes being a participant on such a squad one of the most worthwhile experiences a student can have in college.