After having written here regularly for five years now, and fielding various questions from readers, I suppose it was only about time for me to throw some observations out with the aim of getting feedback. Frankly, I am stumped on an issue: juniors within a club.
Now, I have nothing against junior rowing. I started at 14 myself, after all. But since I was a junior, I have not been involved at all in junior rowing until I came to Switzerland. I have become increasingly cynical during my time here.
I have written before how my high school coach, EA Gilcreast, once explained his own approach to junior rowing: he had coached the frosh at Yale prior to coaching my high school. Every year, he would get a bunch of hot-headed arrogant frosh who had rowed as schoolboys and spent their college freshman years reminiscing about how they had done things back in school. By their sophomore (second) years, they were out of the sport. When he became a high school coach, he decided that the best thing he could do would be to coach kids to love the sport in general and who would carry on long after their school careers were over. He takes great pride in the number of rowers who have carried on influenced by his coaching long after they graduated.
His expression of his ideas, which I heard only years later, certainly is reflected in my own personal experiences as a collegiate coach. I much prefer to take a bunch of novices and teach them to row than to rely on a bunch of recruits. Adding a few experienced frosh into the mix can help enormously, but they must have the right attitude.
So I came into this situation with certain biases. When I was introduced at Belvoir Ruderclub, I offered to help them out however they saw fit. First Dave Martin, the former head coach, and then Holger Weißböck, the current head coach, asked me to look after juniors primarily. Dave basically wanted me to plug holes in the training – I covered practices for him when he was unavailable (usually because of his commitments coaching the Swiss national team), and one permanent hole was the Boys’ Junior B 2X. Holger seems less inclined to have me fill holes for him (without Swiss squad commitments, he is in the club more than Dave was), so he essentially asked me to oversee junior rowing in general and do less with the seniors.
Although I had no experience with juniors, I am certainly up for any challenge. All I ask is that the people I coach be serious about their training – within the appropriate parameters, of course.
As Dave explained to me, junior rowing in Switzerland is unlike the junior rowing I am familiar with from North America or the U.K. Training is not so heavy. There is no school rowing – rowing is merely an activity. For those who wish to compete, training only has to be regular and supervised to produce relatively good results. The level is not nearly as high.
On the other hand, it is difficult to get involved in competitive rowing in Switzerland if someone does not start young. People do start in their late teens or even as adults, but they are usually channeled into recreational rowing and not competitive rowing. So, it is important for a competitive club to develop its juniors properly. That means that although junior rowing is not at an especially high level, it is critical for the competitive health of the sport that juniors have a good grounding.
So, I scratch my head and get to work. I find it frustrating. Kids who only practice three or four days a week still fail to show up for a week or two because they “get sick” (must be one hell of an illness!). Or they show up at the wrong time (I work long hours which don’t really match the best training time for teenagers in school who would rather train in the mid-afternoon while I am still in the office), so I can’t supervise them or keep track of them. Or they come down when I am scheduled but would rather erg or do some other scheduled work-out (the head coach has a general training plan posted for those who need to train on their own outside supervised practices – obviously when we go on the water for a coached session we adapt the training plan for the needs of the specific crews on the water). So off I’ve gone on the water without everyone. Then some of them wonder why I do not coach them enough.
I have taken a laid-back attitude to all of this (yes, I have learned how to be laid-back about rowing!). Everyone knows my schedule. If they want me to coach them, they can be there when I am. I am willing to be flexible and change days to correspond with their schedules, but in general they know when I can and cannot come and we can in theory work accordingly. Some of them certainly are good at this. I cannot be bothered about the others. I also do not want to put undue pressure on the kids – if the goal is to make them enjoy rowing and want to keep at it, then I won’t push them to do things they do not want to do (in general – obviously, they are certainly going to gripe about certain practices or boat combinations). But if they are in the three-to-four-days-a-week category, then we train accordingly.
We do not have a big squad of juniors, so it’s not really a matter of mix-and-match but rather work with what’s there. My youngest is 14. My least-experienced is a novice 15-year-old who is completely deaf and is doing an organized activity with hearing children for the first time in his life (this is the most rewarding experience I have had this year, incidentally – besides learning to row, he is really opening up from his inherent shyness around hearing people; it has also been instructive learning how to coach a deaf rower who can read the lips of someone speaking written German but who has a limited rowing vocab). Most of the kids are hardly developed physically – and I do not think it right to push developing adolescents the same way I would push college kids.
Some kids have taken a greater interest in working with me than others, and I have enjoyed working with them. As for the others, I am not sure there is much I can do. If they complain that I am ignoring them, and they have, then I expect them to make a better effort to show up to practice when I am there or to try to arrange another suitable time with me in advance and I can try to be flexible for them. If I see someone once every two weeks, they can hardly expect me work any wonders.
Although I am sure the club would rather I look after them more, I really cannot be bothered if they cannot be bothered. My coaching time commitment has actually increased this year over last year, and the kids (or some of them) seem to respond as though I am giving less and they expect more. The club has an open-door policy, so the kids can come down after school and do their homework there or train whenever they like pretty much. With a full-time coach there pretty much all the time, safety is not a worry. So they train without me if they feel like it. The corollary is I cannot take a hard line with them.
We recently got a new coach in our club whose work has brought him to Zurich. He is a successful junior coach from Canada. We tried assigning to him the juniors who seemed less willing to work with me to see what he could do. Since he is used to junior rowing – and serious junior rowing at that – he very quickly got annoyed by exactly the issues which bothered me. So he decided to take a hard line – something I had not been willing to do with juniors. He basically read them the riot act: he said he did not expect a greater time commitment than what they were already giving, he just expected them to make more serious use of that time, to coordinate their training with him in advance so they could arrange mutually convenient schedules, and then to put some effort in when they were there. This approach appeared to work for about a week or two, and then they reverted. I feel vindicated now that the problem was not me.
But that does not mean there is not a problem here. Maybe it is cultural and I just do not understand the Swiss. Maybe it is something else. Maybe I do not understand junior rowing.
Over the course of this past Spring, several of us have sat down to talk about development issues for our competitive squad. My views were at complete variance from the club’s big-wigs – and from everyone else I have spoken to, for that matter.
From my observations, I would surmise that we have an image problem in Belvoir: most of Swiss rowing appears to resent us and our success. This stems almost solely from the fact that the overwhelming majority of our rowers did not learn to row at Belvoir. The mutterings I have overheard from others is that Belvoir poaches the top rowers from other clubs, something which is simply not regarded as proper in Switzerland. This is not true. Although most of our rowers come from elsewhere, they come to Belvoir for two reasons. Many are not from Zurich, and when they move here they need to find a new place to row – I hardly call that poaching. As for the ones who come from other Zurich or Zurich-area clubs, they transfer to Belvoir not because we poach but because we offer competitive rowing in crew boats and full-time coaching. If someone wants to compete in crews at a reasonable level and have regular coaching, not many clubs offer that. Furthermore, the two most famous and traditional clubs in Zurich which do regularly compete in crew boats at a good standard, will not admit women, so women in Zurich don’t have much choice (join Belvoir or scull in a single without a regular coach). And men might prefer Belvoir’s relaxed atmosphere to other competitive clubs. If the many clubs in the Zurich area stepped up their game – improved the level and time commitment of their coaching, de-emphasized the single and stressed large boats for competition – they might not lose rowers and they might even attract rowers who move to Zurich from elsewhere.
Certainly, however, there is pressure on Belvoir to do something about developing a junior program. This is not only because of reputation, but also because the senior squad which has been developed in Belvoir over the course of the last few years is getting older and attrition is only a matter of time (we’ve lost a couple this year). We need to think about development to replenish our squad as natural attrition takes its toll.
There was a time not long ago (mid-1990s) when the bulk of the Swiss junior team (boys and girls) came from Belvoir, so it is not an impossible task. But I have become convinced that it is not a worthwhile use of resources.
Grasshopper Club has a large junior program. Go down to the lake on any given day, and they have wave upon wave of juniors taking to the water. But to do this, they require coaches able to come down at all hours of the afternoon on a daily basis. They certainly have a lot of coaches. We do not have the coaches. We also do not have the equipment – if we had that many juniors, we’d run out of shells in a hurry (even though we are hardly lacking for equipment and have quite a luxurious fleet). But, as I noted above, junior rowing in Switzerland is not as serious as junior rowing in North America or Britain. It also has a higher attrition rate.
I think a club which has as a goal success at the senior level should not waste time on junior development. This does not mean to ditch interested juniors, but simply not to make a large junior program a priority. For example, if our goal is to have a solid core of senior athletes, how many juniors would we have to train to produce one solid senior? There is no way of telling if a 14-year-old novice is going to be any good. The kid has not matured yet physically or mentally. We could spend a lot of time coaching someone up who does not end up developing into a core athlete. We could also develop a talented athlete only to have that kid quit at 18 (as happened with all of Belvoir’s junior boys from the mid-1990s – leaving Belvoir’s men’s ranks severely depleted for years afterwards). To get a meaningful development program going here, we’d need to have a junior squad as large as Grasshopper’s.
My counter proposal was this: don’t turn away juniors, to be sure, but actively recruit athletes in the 18-23 age range from other sports. Switzerland is a physically fit country, and most people are athletic from a young age. Rowing is a great sport, and is something taken up at a later age in most countries. I think we should find athletes who are already developed physically and mentally as athletes and encourage them to try rowing. If they don’t like it, they’ll leave. But we have a sport which is easy to sell, so let’s sell it. Getting someone who is already athletic means we know what our package is – someone who already has the physical and mental wherewithal to succeed in athletic competition. Getting someone who is more mature also means that the person already has a better sense of how to balance life commitments with doing a sport.
We are not talking about training up people to win medals at the World Championships one year after they learn to row. We are talking about getting a core of athletes in the club who can succeed in club competitions within Switzerland and as they develop in the squad outside competition. We do have some rowers in the club who have rowed internationally who started the sport as adults (one started at 37 years old and was representing Britain in the single two years later!). But for the most part we are looking for athletes who simply want an outlet for their athleticism and can be valuable members of our squad. If we can bring in a few of these every year, we will quickly replenish our ranks to make up for natural attrition. And, I think, it would be a much more efficient way of doing this – efficient in terms of time, coaches, equipment, and retention rates.
Anyway, I seem to be in a minority of one. I have yet to meet anyone here who agrees with my suggestion. It seems it is all about developing the club via a junior program. And when it comes to that, I am confused.
I might add a couple footnotes. I do believe that in a serious school program such as exists in other countries (North America, Britain, Australia, and so forth) there is a place for pushing those kids who show the interest for intensive training, and there is also a place for lower boats. But a school program is really just a captive junior-oriented club in an ultra-organized setting. What I am scratching my head about here is the place of juniors in a generic club trying to excel at the senior level.
Second footnote is regarding clubs in out-of-the-way places. These have a great deal to gain for sponsoring junior programs. First of all is the community service, and community service means better community relations and even government grants or zoning permissions. Second is the fact that new rowers have to come from somewhere, and it is good to get young people hooked - and get their parents hooked. Lots of folks start rowing after sseeing their kids try it and benefit. And interested parents are also potential donors to a club which brings so many positive things to their children specifically and the community in general. But my main issue in this month's letter has little to do with this sort of club and everything to do with a large club in a rowing city with a dozen rowing clubs. Maybe we should leave the juniors to those clubs who can better specialize in junior rowing and focus our own effort on luring novice adults. Then again, maybe not, since no one else around here agrees with me.