To remind my British readers, the Dad Vail Regatta serves as the Division III Collegiate National Championship. What constitutes Div III is somewhat arbitrary - essentially, it is anyone who hasn’t seen the need to promote themselves to Div II on the upper end, to all comers who fancy a shot on the lower end. This year, exactly one hundred colleges showed up.
I first described my impressions of Dad Vails when I made my first-ever trip there in 1997 (see my letter from May 1997). Those impressions have not really changed at all. What has changed is my expectations. In 1997, William & Mary Rowing attended Vails for fun, an exciting climax to the season. By 1999, we are one of the largest programs in the United States and have more serious aspirations. We have, frankly, outgrown Vails.
We had considered promoting our program to Champion (Div II) this year, but that option became a moot point when Champion had to change its date to a date in conflict with our graduation. We may not have many seniors, but I will not deprive them of their college graduation. So our move to Champion got delayed to next year. After attending Vails this year and reliving its inherent problems, our frustration with the Dad Vail Regatta became intense enough to convince everyone of the need to move on.
Before I embark any further, I should preface my remarks with one important comment: I have no problems whatsoever with the Dad Vail Organizing Committee. These are fine people who truly care about the regatta and the competitors, and they volunteer enormous amounts of time to seeing that it comes off as well as humanly possible. My hat (if I were wearing one) goes off to them.
Their regatta, however, is inherently flawed. This is a shame, but is the nature of the beast. There is nothing obvious for them to do to rectify all of the problems, which is probably why they asked me to free-associate and see if I couldn’t come up with any ideas (workable or not).
The Dad Vail Regatta is a zoo. If I want a carnival atmosphere, I will go to a race like the Head of the Charles - a fantastic event. But, at this time of year, I want a championship regatta, not a carnival. The students are in the middle of exams, and they get exemptions in the exam schedule in order to compete at a serious event. If they are to rearrange their exam schedules, they need to know that they will be respected as athletes, and that the regatta will be run under optimal competitive conditions.
Quite frankly, no such regatta can be run in Philadelphia (and I say this as a loyal native Philadelphian). My main complaint from 1997 still holds, and will hold forever: the racecourse is atrocious. In this day and age, no championship regatta should ever take place on a race course with a dogleg. There are enough straight racecourses around that we don’t need to race an important race on a crooked one.
The Cooper River, in nearby Camden, New Jersey, has become an important venue in the last decade. I am not sure that there is enough space for one hundred colleges to park trailers and have all of their crews warm-up properly, but it should be considered. For one, its proximity to Philadelphia would mean that the same wonderful organizing committee could remain in charge of Vails. However, to get Vails to fit at that location would mean a need to address some of the other issues I will raise below, in order to limit size.
Besides the dogleg, incidentally, the Schuylkill also has the dreaded Lane Six. Lane Six is out of the stream, which is not a major factor, but runs alongside an island for the final 400 meters, which is a major factor. The water in Lane Six as it passes the island is dead. This year, we had two crews draw that lane - the JV men in their semi-final and the V women in their final. The respective coxswains were our most experienced, and I fully trust their judgement. In practice, one had even tested various routes down that Lane. They both reported - and observation from my bike confirmed - that the water got very slow there. That is no way to run a championship race. The venue must change.
Another problem with the venue is the City of Philadelphia itself. For a rowing town, it is a very rowing-unfriendly city. As a Philadelphia native, I do keep informed about local politics, and am quite familiar with what goes on in the city government. Rowing is a political issue in Philadelphia, and the important figures in city politics hate rowing and have gone out of their way to cause grief for the rowing community. One week-long period in October makes this clear: the Head of the Charles and the Head of the Schuylkill fall on consecutive weekends, and the contrast between how the two cities welcome their respective regattas is striking.
In my experience in recent years, I have found the Philadelphia police assigned to the regatta to be very officious. The Dad Vail organizers have to pay the City a lot of money for the extra cops, and they have to set up some clear groundrules. The cops often choose to ignore the groundrules. Rather than facilitate the needs of the regatta, they encumber it unnecessarily. Two examples involving parking passes made this excessively clear this year (I have many other examples, but these stuck out).
During the Regatta, crew vehicles obviously need the appropriate parking passes, which are limited. We cannot afford team busses and the College does not give us access to College vans, so we always have to carpool. On Regatta days, we simply cram people into cars and run shuttles between the site and the hotel to make up for our limited number of parking passes. We fully accept that scenario. We were not prepared for what we faced this year.
Parking passes were distributed at registration instead of being mailed out in advance. That was fine, considering that they were not planning on checking passes on the day before the regatta when we were arriving (parking being plentiful because crews arrive staggered throughout the day). Well, they decided to check for passes. Of course, our cars did not have passes since they were on the outside and registration was on the inside. So our athletes were turned away. The police had a bunch of exceptions, which I called the "William & Mary exclusionary rule." They let in team busses (which we could not afford); they let in official vans with College crests (which William & Mary will not let us have); they let in teams which were too small to fill vans and therefore had to come in cars (and we were probably the largest team there, so this did not help us either); and they let in cars belonging to athletes from Philadelphia-area colleges (also not us). I figure that we were the only program which got excluded by these rules. I was on the inside - having come early and been dropped off to register - so I argued the point, and they claimed they would start letting us in, but they did not. So our athletes had to park somewhere far away and hike to the river.
The organizers, ever pleasant and fully aware of our predicament with needing so many cars (one of the largest programs in the country, but also the poorest per capita), slipped me several extra parking passes this year. Thank you!
At Dad Vails, I always set aside a "team drop-off" pass for parents lugging food and tables and tents. The pass allows them to drive in to drop stuff off but not to park. After dropping stuff off, they park elsewhere, where they hand the pass off to another parent who drives through and drops of more stuff. On the semi-final and final day this year, the police decided to interpret the drop-off pass as applying only to athletes, and turned our supporters away even when they had the pass. So we were unable to set up our tent and bring food and water to the site until we managed to do some quick and illegal maneuvering on the road near our trailer (which was parked near the part of the road which was not blocked to normal traffic). But our crews which came in from the earlier races that morning were in desperate need of hydration and we had no way of getting them water.
Water is an issue at this regatta. There is none. They do set up a food tent for the athletes (spicy pasta, salad, bread) but it has inadequate water (last year it had none and the pasta was especially salty). The food tent also does not open until lunchtime, which did not help us with the early races when we could not set up our own food and water. The only place to get liquid in this park seems to be at the finish line, but that is a mile away from the boat trailers. Allowing the athletes to keep hydrated should be a priority.
Moving out of Philadelphia will not solve some problems. I do have a bone to pick with the organizers, and that is how they go about setting up the racing schedule. Dad Vails has the most illogical progression system I have ever seen. If they wanted to stay in Philadelphia, they could just as well avoid Lane Six altogether since they only use a six-lane course because that is the international norm but they refuse to use anything resembling the international norm for progression on a six-lane course. Uneven heats lead to uneven reps lead to uneven semis. Different numbers of crews are in different heats, with different numbers qualifying out of each heat. And lane assignments do not necessarily correlate. As a result, some heats become races to see who can slow down enough for second place which gets a better progression and lane assignment than first place.
The regatta has a scratch deadline with a penalty for crews which scratch after the deadline. However, it has never once enforced the penalty, so crews scratch with impunity. Before this year, the organizers refused to redraw heats even when they knew that scratches made some heats blatantly unfair (a good number of times I have seen a progression be top-three-progress-others-eliminated, with the several heats having anywhere from three to six crews in them!). This year they redrew two events, because it meant eliminating a level of heats - otherwise they would have left it. This attitude needs to change. They must start penalizing programs which scratch crews late (without a doctor’s note) - a late unexcused scratch should mean excluding all of that program’s crews from that year’s regatta (that is, indeed, the official and never-used threat).
Seeding is another problem the organizers could easily fix. I do not envy the man who does the seeding (it is supposed to be a committee of three, but from what I can tell one person on the committee has little say because his crews do not race in eights, and another gets ignored to a certain extent). It is a difficult proposition to get the seeding right for a bunch of crews from five distinct parts of the country with little overlap or common opponents. But he could help himself by doing the seeding as late as possible in the season - specifically, waiting until after the regional championship regattas (as the regatta literature suggests they do) instead of two weeks prior (as really happens). If there is to be seeding at all, it must be based on how fast crews are at the end of the season, not how fast they were at the beginning of the season. So, for example, the seeder informed me that our men were not seeded going into the regatta because we had lost to Duke, a good but not particularly special crew. Sure we lost to Duke - on our fourth race in two days on a road trip which had taken us halfway to Canada and back way back in March. But the season was young and we were learning from race experience, as all sensible crews do (that is why we have a racing season, after all - to prepare us for the championships). The race we lost to Duke, we also lost to Mason by over two lengths. Well, the week prior to Vails we finished second to Mason at Mid-Atlantics by one third of a length. And Mason was not getting any slower as the season went on either. Now, I do not wish to argue who is faster than whom - I appreciate that the seeder does have a tough job - but to count a single race from March heavily and to count the regional championship race of a week ago not at all seems like a bad way to go about seeding. Not surprisingly, we had little trouble disposing of three seeded crews at Vails, to place tenth overall.
Of course, why does seeding matter? I have already mentioned the progression system. And the way it was set up this year, it mattered not whether a crew was seeded if it was not in the top four for men and top five for women, since those crews got separated in the heats but only one crew from each heat went through to the semis. If they are going to seed twelve crews, as they do, then the progression system does not fit. Dave Kucik, the Purdue coach, mentioned that he figured they might as well not seed at all and just go about the heats-reps-semis-finals as they do in international competitions. He has a point. I don’t mind seeding, but the progression system should reflect the number of crews seeded.
If I am going to complain about the seedings going in, I might as well also complain about the rankings coming out. Beyond the six crews which make the finals, rankings get muddy. What serious championship does not have petit finals, if not also third-level finals? Dad Vails, that’s what. Especially with so vague a progression system, it would still be nice to see where everyone stacks up in the final afternoon instead of having to use semi-final times as a measurement.
Of course, every couple of years coaches do suggest that the regatta implement petits, but the committee always rebuffs them. The reason is always lack of time in the schedule. The regatta does tend to run on time, generally, which is impressive. Efficient management on the day of the finals would allow more races if they really wanted to add them. However, they do not seem interested - there are just too many events.
One of the nice things about the Dad Vails is that it has small-boat events (fours and pairs). If it is truly the national championship regatta for the developing programs, as it claims, then it does a great job a providing an outlet for programs too small to field eights who still deserve a national championship. I do not advocate reducing the number of these events, as has been suggested. However, all these small boats clog the schedule. So if the regatta is to cater to them, then it is not a suitable venue for the programs which have switched to eights. Unless, of course, they split up the regatta into a small-boat championship and an eights championship (and splitting in this way would enable them to move to the Cooper River) - with a prohibition on entering any athlete in both weekends. But that is suddenly doubly the effort required to run the regatta, a lot to ask of a volunteer organizing committee. It also underscores why crews broke away from Vails several years back to start the Champion Internation Collegiate Regatta, a sort-of Div II national championship. So I honestly have no idea how to address this issue and still keep Vails intact - other than to simply run petit finals between the finals (maybe only for the eights events).
In the enormity of Vails, one fact gets lost: the fundamental issue that this is a regatta for developing programs. This is a self-selecting group. There is no desire from the organizers to make people play fair. So, instead, we wind up with some massive pot-hunting. In April, I began to write my letter about pot-hunting, and got halfway before I got too busy to keep going. I will complete that letter and make it into an entry for later on this Summer. For now, I will merely touch on the subject.
Many crews enter inappropriate events at Vails. I have seen pretty developed programs enter crews in the pairs - and they win, so big deal? It would be a big deal for a tiny program that only has two rowers, but not for a large program which stacks its small boats. Save the small boats for the small programs, or for the bottom crews of the bigger programs (so a program with twelve rowers would enter and eight and a four). Some Vails crews race in eights for much of the season, or at least have the bodies to do so, but then break down into fours where the competition is weaker. Vails almost encourages this behavior. But why would coaches want to do this? They are only throttling their programs. I just do not understand this. Race in small boats if you have to, but as a temporary means to develop a program not as an end. I will never feel sorry for programs that stifle their own development in this way, nor will I ever be impressed if they should win in the small boats against legitimately small programs which are honestly developing.
Pot hunting does not only extend to the small boats. This year, the regatta organizers allowed four crews to break the regatta’s own rules and enter crews in the second varsity races without entering crews in the varsity races: SUNY Maritime, Penn State, and the US Merchant Marine Academy for the men, and Vermont for the women. The regatta organizers explained that their coaches said that these crews were not very good and that they merely wanted good competition. That’s fine for a regular season match - it happens all the time as crews benefit from appropriate competition. But if a coach is going to bring his crews to a championship regatta, then he better have his crews prepared to enter the appropriate event. In the end, the Vermont women were not atrocious (and finished fourth). And SUNY Maritime, which we had seen at Mid-Atlantics, had fidgeted with their line-up to get it just faster enough to stand a better chance of qualifying out of a weak heat. The regatta organizers should never allow this sort of gamesmanship. I will make some exceptions when there is an excuse: Villanova men last year, for example. The JV crew they entered at Vails was their JV crew at the beginning of the season to a man. Every single rower in their original first varsity crew had gotten injured during the season, except one whose parents got divorced causing him to have a nervous breakdown and join the marines. Villanova asked for special dispensation to enter a 2V without a V, and got it. They also contacted all the other coaches and explained the situation and asked for our understanding. That was classy, and I had respect for their predicament. Had they lost only four from their V, then they would have had to shuffle accordingly - but they lost all eight, and so this seemed legitimate. This year’s four had no good excuses.
Of course, pot hunting on a grand scale exists in the varsity event as well. There are simply a whole lot of crews which do not belong at Vails in the first place. This is a regatta for developing programs - the entire 1998 program focussed on how wonderful that fact was. But the organizers refuse to define what constitutes "developing." As a result, they let everyone who wants to come in (except for members of the EARC). My letter on pot-hunting addresses this issue, so I may save my breath here. But, to keep it short, the regatta needs to start kicking people out who do not belong there. Once upon a time, developed programs gladly moved on - a right of passage. Today, some do. Many do not - particularly the Philadelphia-based programs. They claim that as Vails is a Philadelphia tradition, they belong there no matter how good they may be. And they claim that anyone who questions their presence is just jealous. I am not jealous of the Temple men - winners for most of the last twenty years. Big deal - Temple can beat up on a bunch of developing programs. What are they proving? I would have to fancy the Duke (men’s or women’s) basketball team’s chances if it joined the Ivy League but got to keep its ACC resources (Duke used to play Harvard every year, to be sure, but playing one game does not mean Duke aspires to win the Ivy crown nor would Duke be proud of itself it did).
St. Joseph’s launched an inspired challenge to the Temple men this year, but even St. Joe’s doesn’t belong at Vails. It is a fine program with good resources - it is time to move on.
To give anohter variation, we have the Villanova women. Villanova’s lightweights were the Div I national champs last year, and have returned all nine of their crew this year. They aspire to repeat at the Div I national championships (although they probably won’t - they were a big surprise last year). Yet they showed up at Vails. Indeed, they entered the heavyweight event (Villanova’s lightweights are perennially stronger than their heavyweights). They argued that since it was legitimately their fastest boat that there should not be an issue. But these are Div I lightweights at a Div III regatta. If, on the men’s side, Princeton got to enter its defending national champion lightweight crew in the heavyweight event at Vails, it would club everyone - Temple included. But Princeton has too much class to do such a thing. Villanova’s coach told the local paper that he entered his lightweights in the heavyweight event in search of stronger competition for them. If he wanted stronger competition, maybe he should have gone to a higher-level championship. Furthermore, by putting his lights in the varsity heavy event, he could move his varsity heavyweight crew (complete with six women who got the silver at Vails last year in the varsity event) into the JV event, which they won - big deal. His little end-game failed, however, as his new lightweight crew failed to defend his proper crew’s title and placed fourth. But why should they let people in who make such a mockery of competition in the first place? If these performances by Villanova were a fluke - the program randomly happened to have a particularly good batch of athletes passing through but could not maintain this level, then I would not have a problem with them being at Vails. But Villanova is a pretty developed and regularly successful program which can (and sometimes does) compete at a higher level.
These comments are not meant as insults towards Temple and Villanova and the other developed programs which insist on attending Vails every year. I would count it as a compliment to be told that my program was "developed" and worthy to move on to a higher level of competition. In the European soccer leagues, does a team promoted from the second division to the first, for example, complain it is being insulted by being told it should compete the following year at the higher division? I think not. Does a schoolboy feel insulted when he is told he passed his exams and should return to school the following year in a higher grade/form? I think not. These programs have done a good job - in some cases they have done a great job. Now it is time to play in the appropriate league.
Examining the list of programs which placed near the top at Vails, most do not fit the "developing" definition. So, either Vails needs to redefine itself, or it needs to start setting an upper standard.
For my final complaint, I return to the carnival-like atmosphere at Vails. When crews get serious, they don’t want "fun," they want a proper championship. We don’t need rock music blasting on the finish line. We don’t need put-put golf. We don’t need bouncy castles. Henley Royal may have a lot of silliness, but at least the organizers at HRR haven’t forgotten about the athletes. Although the festivities at HRR do not require the rowing (except as an excuse for the festivities), at least those festivities do not affect the racing.
Dad Vails means fun for the whole family. So, for example, I watched them delay racing in order to let a new batch of students have the opportunity to work the stakeboats, instead of waiting for a natural break (or even for six replacement people to arrive). They need the officious police force in order to keep order, but then they act surprised when the police won’t let parents bring water in for the athletes. The want to cater to all comers, but that crowds the schedule with so many events that they can’t run what they’ve got properly. One hundred trailers line the riverbank, but some people (us in 1998) get left carrying their boats through the encampment for quite some distances. This leads the dockmaster to call crews to launch an hour and a quarter before race time, which results in many crews arriving at the start extremely early (much to the marshalls’ dismay - they had no explanation for the crowd above the start where there was no room to move around until I pointed this out). The whole place is a zoo. The athletes deserve something more serious.