People at Wolfson should know the answer: there is no step-by-step. I set three years as a goal, and off I go achieving it. I have no formula in long-term planning just like I have no formula in short-term planning. Any plan must be flexible enough to achieve its goals by adapting to the situations as they arise. And situations do indeed arise. When I got here in Fall 1996, I could never have predicted we'd be exactly where we are today. No my plan is not so specific; it is a general outlook on rowing.
So, what's the secret? There is no secret, in my mind. There are no secrets in rowing any more. Nor do I see what has gone on here at William and Mary to be all that extraordinary. Two things are extraordinary: we have a fantastic group of students, is the first thing. The second thing I find extraordinary is that what has happened here doesn't happen everywhere. As I said, there are no secrets. I have no secrets - I am doing my job, and that's all. And the students are rowing, and that's all, too. Where's the secret in that?
I constantly sing the praises of the students here. But I would sing the praises of anyone I coach - or I would not coach them. We have no resources other than our students, so what they make of themselves is what our program will end up making of itself. They have been willing to dream and work hard, both together. That's all I can ask. It has been an enormous privelege working with them over the past two and half years.
Of course, all the same things applied - if in miniature - at Wolfson, which went from being the worst women's program on the Isis without enough women to put out a single eight to become one of the strongest and deepest programs in the league.
My most important duty as Head Coach is not just to think about what to do in practice each day or how to win in the Spring, but rather to consider the long-term health of the program. When I arrived in the Fall of 1996, there was not much to Rowing at William and Mary in terms of athletes, equipment, or tradition. Anything I might do to change that would be useless if the program could not perpetuate itself indefinitely. I implemented my "Three-Year Development Plan" with the goal to leave William and Mary Rowing after the 1999 season at a level where it could sustain itself as the dominant program in the Mid-Atlantic region and one of the most competitive unfunded programs in the United States.
The core of the program is, of course, the athletes. It is they who do the work, not I. But given committed athletes, it still takes three years simply to produce enough raw material. There must first be a class of role models, then a group they inspire, and finally a third year to fill out numbers. On the women’s side, we were fortunate to have the three members of the Class of 1998 (American classes are number by year of graduation, not year of matriculation as in Britain), supplemented by a single rower from the Class of 1999. They produced the dominant varsity four in the region in 1997, and more importantly served as the role models for that year’s novice women. The women were therefore a step ahead of the men, who needed to start over with the 1997 frosh crews as cornerstones of the new tradition. By the 1999-2000 season, both halves of our program will have filled out, and we will have full representation from all four classes for the first time. Once that happens, it will be easy to sustain momentum.
Momentum is important for any program, but more so in this case. I knew when I got here that I would be unable to afford to remain in Williamsburg beyond the 1999 season. It was therefore imperative that the program be in a position where it could sustain itself beyond my departure. Even with turn-over on the coaching staff, momentum means a system will already be in place. Varsity crews, having a critical mass of Seniors, Juniors, and Sophomores (fourth-, third-, and second-year undergrads, in American parlance), will continue to feed each year from a novice program. It is more critical that the novice program produce varsity rowers than necessarily fast Freshman crews. Rowers must come away from their novice years with a love for the sport, lasting friendships, and a feeling that rowing is an integral part of their academic lives. We already have one of the largest programs in the country outside Division I. I see no reason we should not strive to provide rowing opportunities to as many people as possible, and be the largest club-status program in the country (we may already be that) and one of the largest of any description. The more bodies rowing, the more competitive our crews.
The new rowers must also feel that they are taking part in a tradition. Discontinuity in the club during the 1990s meant that no traditions passed down to the team I inherited in 1996. The novices, particularly the men, looked around and figured that rowing was something freshmen did for maybe a year, but which few thought worth doing long-term. Rowing in an isolated corner of the country, I needed to find a way to link the team to the broader traditions of the sport - and hence I inaugurated the web site both as a way to link our rowers to the outside world and to increase the profile of our program in the outside world.
When I first decided to come to William and Mary (in February 1995, a year and half before I actually moved here), I did not even know if there was rowing here. Today, the sheer number of recruits from all over the country and world who contact us regularly attests to the profile our program now has (I must admit that not one of our recruits has yet received admission to William & Mary, but that's the job of the Admissions Office). I also personally receive numerous e-mails from other coaches and all manner of rowers from all over the world. We need to maintain this visibility.
Visibility also means competing. Competition is an integral part of any sport and the reason people want to train hard. I thought about the racing schedule I found in place in 1996, and realized it was time to make some changes. In each of the three years of the development plan, I intended to raise the bar. Every crew needed a full racing season, and that season needed to be challenging. One trip to Dad Vails - my first ever - in 1997 also exposed me to the problematic nature of that regatta, the Div III national championship. I would like to see this program graduate quickly to start competing at Champion, the Div II championship. We, of course, needed to field crews competitive at that level first. But I see that as a very attainable goal. The date of the 1999 Champion regatta got moved because of a conflicting event on the racecourse, and now will fall on the same day as our Commencement, so we will wait until 2000 to make the jump. I see no reason this program cannot be one of the consistently most competitive programs at that level in the long term. I would also like to see William and Mary send deserving crews on to Henley - and I think that June 2000 is not too early a date to expect to have both men’s and women’s crews of a caliber able to compete at the world’s most prestigious regatta (whether we can afford the trip is another matter).
When I arrived at William and Mary, I also noted the tendency in the South to have regattas instead of the match-races favored in the college and high school leagues of the Northeast. The system used up there has provided a more rewarding experience for all athletes, and has enabled programs to feed off each other and to develop together. The region desperately lacked such a format in 1996. I have begun several home-away match races with other programs of similar size to ours, and have encouraged the small programs to do the same among themselves with the goal of quickly growing into large programs. In ten years, I would like to see a thriving league of a dozen colleges from Virginia, DC, Maryland, Delaware, and possibly Pennsylvania (outside the Philadelphia area which already has its league) forming a Mid-Atlantic Intercollegiate Rowing Conference, with a full season of match races culminating in a properly-seeded Mid-Atlantic Championship (the framework for which already exists, as run by Mason), a league on a par with the conferences for Champion-level programs in New England and New York State.
To participate properly in such a league, however, will require us to have a home race course. Given the academic demands of William and Mary, we should not have to ask our students to travel every single weekend during the season. Yet our current course is inadequate. The James River is very unpredictable - although almost always rowable, it has not cooperated on three of the four home race dates we have had scheduled in the last two years, leaving us racing on unacceptable makeshift courses on College Creek. For this year, we are looking for neutral sites (such as racing Virginia Tech - supposed to be a home race for us - in Norfolk on ODU’s newly surveyed and buoyed course). One of the projects high up on the urgent list for the Friends is to locate a site to host home races so that we can develop a proper racing schedule - preferably a site where we can also build a boathouse nearby.
The boathouse issue is also of utmost importance. We currently row out of Kingspoint Community Center. But the folks at Kingspoint, although very supportive of us, welcomed us there back when there was not much to our program. As we have grown, we have overrun the facilities. We have equipment piled everywhere, cars parked all over the streets, and people coming and going at all hours of the day (even for my infamous 1 a.m. practices). It is only a matter of time before tension develops with the community.
Furthermore, the site is silting in. At low tide, we are often unable to practice because of the mud. Two years ago, mud cost us five days of practice leading up to Vails, something which crippled our crews’ performances. Residents have told me that when the bridge upstream of our dock gets expanded, College Creek will silt in even faster. We must be out of the current site by Fall 2000.
Another obvious reason to have a boathouse is to protect our equipment. Our boats sit outside in the elements through Summer suns and Winter frosts. They are also susceptible to vandals, and we have had an increasing number of incidents of vandalism, particularly to our launches. There is no possibility of building any sort of shelter at the current site because of regulations regarding an underground gas main.
Finally, we need a new site in order to expand rowing to the Williamsburg community. I get calls regularly from people in the area who want to learn how to row or who rowed once upon a time and wish to resume. The Williamsburg Rowing Club, which exists on paper (and has even raced once) will provide the opportunities for this which the collegiate club cannot. In many places, college and community clubs have worked together successfully for mutual benefit. We need to create an active Williamsburg Rowing Club under the auspices of the Friends of Williamsburg Rowing, so that there will be coordination between the two programs. And since it will be decades before William and Mary Rowing could afford to build a boathouse on its own (not to mention to purchase land on which to build), it is therefore imperative that we have a community-based side which could secure our team a boathouse and site in the near future.
The long-term finances of the team are a final concern. Again, the community provides the key. This is a wealthy area with many potential sponsors. Now that the team is successful and highly visible, we have become an attractive group to sponsor. The Friends must continue to expand their reach. We think we have a great product here. We need a capital fund to ensure the team’s future, something that will guarantee that new boats come in regularly as the old ones age and which can underwrite coaches’ salaries to an amount competitive with other large club programs since continuity in coaching is extremely important for long-term health.
William and Mary Rowing must strive for complete financial independence. There is little chance we will achieve varsity status any time soon - William and Mary is a small, state-run, liberal arts college which is in compliance with Title IX and which has cut successful sports in recent years and has no money to add an expensive sport like rowing. As every other rowing program in Virginia seems headed for varsity status - if it has not gotten it already - we must find other means of funding.
Another issue which is of enormous importance to me has been to bind the men’s and women’s teams together. When I coached in England, I witnessed first-hand the active discrimination by many establishment clubs against their women, for the benefit of no one. My experience in this sport at all levels has always been that mutual support breads success. I became an outspoken advocate of women’s rowing in England, and have brought those lessons back to the States.
Even now that we have enough equipment that men and women do not need to share very often, we must make sure that the two halves of the program continue to work together. We cannot become two separate programs. Men and women must travel together and share the same leadership structure. In the United States we are seeing some misguided athletics departments, with no understanding of the role of sports in a college education, begin to discriminate against men’s rowing to an extent even worse than I witnessed discrimination against women’s rowing in some colleges in England. If down the road William and Mary does offer the women varsity status without the men, we must take great care in setting this up. The University of Virginia handled this decision wisely, and the men are properly looked after both by the women and by their equivalent of the Friends. Some colleges have skewered their men in order to promote women. And some colleges, through sheer ignorance of the sport and incomprehension of the reasons for collegiate athletics, have used the promotion of women to varsity status to unduly meddle in the women’s program, thus gutting the very women they intended to promote. We must ensure that the men’s and women’s programs are so tightly bound together that all the hard work we have put in to building this program out of nothing does not get undone by a rash decision not thought out. A program which is institutionally strong in its own right will be better placed to negotiate any future changes of status - again, the University of Virginia Rowing Association is instructive. My admiration for UVA's Kevin Sauer is extremely high - a fine coach and gentleman.
We need to be in a position of strength for other reasons, too. It will be years before this program has enough money in the capital fund to pay our coaches competitive salaries. We are also not in a part of the country known for rowing, so finding proper coaching here has been a matter of luck of who happened to move here for other reasons. In order to attract coaches, we need the attitudes of the students on the team to speak for themselves. Last year, I was over-extended and desperately needed help. I told the athletes - and I do not think they believed me - that the very excitement of having the opportunity to work with athletes with this much determination and enthusiasm would attract good coaches, lack of pay notwithstanding. Indeed, at the end of the last spring I received applications from dozens of people willing to move here for the sake of coaching in this program and who would do whatever else they needed to in order to support themselves. I am pleased that Scott Belford, who joined us this year to work with the varsity women with fantastic results so far and to come, will assume the position of Head Coach and intends to stay on through the 2002 season. But with the experience of last year and the knowledge that this program is in good health and filled with fantastic students, I am convinced that we can find quality replacements. Under Scott’s guidance, our program can step up to the next level in confidence. His tenure will also give this program the continuity which will further establish its strength for years to come. And only from institutional strength will we be able to attract coaches to Williamsburg. The program itself needs to be its own number one asset.
So, what is the "Three Year Development Plan?" It is a way to get from where we were to where we are now in three years, and making everyone believe it will happen along the way. Why everyone doesn't do this, I do not understand.