Although I have been away for over five years now, I do periodically look back at what is going on in Oxford.  After all, this monthly column is still technically inspired by the folks at Wolfson College (although someone should really update their website one of these years, as it has gone from just out-of-date to plain embarrassing).

So, what is happening in Oxford these days?  It has come to my attention that the folks who administer rowing at Oxford, the so-called OURCs (stands for Oxford University Rowing Clubs, a confederation of the college and university boat clubs, but somewhere along the line the name morphed to refer to the people who run the show), have started to climb several rungs further up the bureaucratic ladder.  It is hard to believe this would be possible, but leave it to them to figure out a way to become even more bureaucratic.

I gather the impetus for this nonsense came from the University this time, and was not entirely their own idea, although I am sure they love this stuff.  There have been a number of accidents involving Oxford crews in recent years, culminating in the drowning of an Oxford lightweight in Spain a year ago.  From what I understand, the University was concerned about safety and asked the OURCs to draw up some sort of safety plan for the sport.

Now, I am certainly sympathetic to the notion of an obtrusive university which does not understand (or want to understand) rowing thinking that rowing is somehow a dangerous sport and trying to force all sorts of crazy safety measures into place which do nothing.  If the opportunity is presented, then, it should be the mission of those within the sport to cut the university off at the pass and write rules which actually make sense, dissuade the university that this is somehow a dangerous sport, and stop the university from actually imposing imbecilic rules.  It would appear, however, that the OURCs are taking this opportunity to increase bureaucracy and their own power.

I am sympathetic because this situation actually happened to me once.  When I coached at William and Mary, the College was unsupportive of the team but somehow thought we should implement safety measures (although it did not see the need to provide the necessary funding to do this properly).  After one incident, which would hardly go down in the annals of rowing as anything special, the College demanded new written safety and supervision rules – either we write our own which met their approval, or they would write them for us.  One of the rules the College proposed was that no crews be allowed to practice if windspeeds exceeded 5 mph (and we rowed on extremely protected water, so a 5 mph wind would probably not even be noticed).  The College had other crazy ideas, so it was somewhat crucial for me to spring into action.  One of the last things I did in my tenure as head coach there was to write a new set of rules which met the College’s approval.

I am not proud of those rules, but they did the trick.  The rules combine specific issues which the College itself required as non-negotiable, rules which we already followed but did not have codified in writing, and areas the College wanted to regulate for which I came up with convoluted and often oddly-drafted rules that would satisfy the College but would give the team enough flexibility to operate in reality.

The first place the College expected me to turn was to other colleges.  So I did.  The response was usually the same: we use common sense but have no written rules except in some cases for traffic patterns specific to the body of water.  So I got a sense of what the unwritten rules were.  I also researched places which did have written rules, which were often not colleges but groups of collegiate and community clubs which had gotten together to write rules for their bodies of water.  Some of the most detailed written rules came from clubs in Canada, which had obvious concerns about the weather that did not apply to the southern USA.  And I contacted the insurance company to see if they had any requirements they would like us to have in writing (there were some suggestions from them which were perhaps overkill given the body of water we rowed on, but since they were not obtrusive and it would make the College happy to know we were implementing all of the insurance company’s suggestions, I put them in).

I had planned to give the College copies of written rules I found elsewhere, but thought better of this idea.  Most places with detailed written rules beyond the basic traffic and safety rules were clubs in Canada or places exposed to weather (cold, open water, that sort of thing).  These were not very useful for a club which practiced in a warm climate on a completely protected, narrow, and shallow body of water.  Mostly I codified rules we already followed regarding the supervision of novices or not allowing unsupervised crews to go out on the James River (which is wide, deep, navigable by shipping, and unprotected in every sense of the word, but which is also four miles from the dock).

There were other rules too which I did not want the College to see (such as the safety equipment in the launch specified to contain things like space blankets) so as not to give anyone any ideas.  If we had a proper budget, we might have implemented such rules, but we had no money and no place to store things like space blankets.  And who needs space blankets in southern Virginia?

I am not cavalier about safety, but most of it is, as numerous collegiate coaches were telling me when I was researching this project, a matter for common sense and not written rules.  So I drafted in such a way as to leave wiggle-room, including plans which codified the role of experienced coxswains and deputized them as coaches under certain circumstances.  But where the College wanted specific rules, mostly in terms of reporting and dealing with what it considered “incidents,” I had no space.

As I have said, I am not proud of these rules, but they served their purpose and gave W&M the most detailed set of written rules specific to any one college program I was aware of at that time.  The critical issue, as far as I was concerned, was that, with one minor exception, they produced absolutely no additional layer of bureaucracy (the minor exception was the institution of a log-book for crews to sign out and back in, which was at the reasonable request of the insurance company but was in practice a silly exercise for a program which could only row downstream – upstream was too shallow – and had too little equipment so the head coach had to keep track of who was using what equipment when anyway).  The College was happy, the team was safe, and all was well.

The OURCs have taken the opposite approach.  They are natural bureaucrats, so the solution they have for everything is to regulate it to death.  Granted they are trying to supervise almost forty different college clubs, whereas I was just implementing rules for one, but that is still no excuse.  I always thought they should simply concern themselves with codifying traffic patterns on what is a nasty bit of river (which would include certain restrictions, such as the no-more-than-one crew at a time in the early morning and specific times limited to first eights only, which are meant to relieve congestion and count as traffic patterns), running Oxford regattas (including defining eligibility), a maybe a minimum of safety rules which affect other crews (such as requiring bowballs, which could arguably fall under traffic safety rules).  Other than that, they should leave everyone alone.

I think I once wrote here about my very first encounter with a member of the OURCs committee who tried to prevent me from doing a certain drill with a crew I was coaching.  I think it was my first day coaching on the Isis and I certainly had no idea who she was, so I told her to mind her own business in slightly more colorful language, much to her and my crew’s astonishment.

The OURC rules do not regulate what drills a coach can or cannot do with his crews, so long as proper traffic patterns are being observed, but the new safety plans being implemented would appear to come close.  The plan suggests implementing everything up to and including a special certification for coaches who want to use the rowing tank.  We’re not even talking a proper rowing tank here, as Oxford only has one and it is atrocious.  It is also a still-water tank.  There really is nothing dangerous about it unless a coach thinks he can have his crew row at race rates in there (still-water tank plus lousy design means rates should not really exceed 20 spm at the risk of destroying backs).  But to suggest that coaches (who the plan would have get stacks of other certifications) need an extra certification to coach in the tank makes absolutely no sense.  And that is just one of the many certifications the OURCs would require for coaches to do their jobs (not to mention certifications or training courses for all sorts of other people even vaguely associated with the clubs).

At a certain point, all of this bureaucracy ceases to be fun.  Once an activity ceases to be fun, people will quit in droves.  If the OURCs’ objective is to make rowing in Oxford more manageable by driving all but a handful of people away from the sport, then this is a brilliant plan.  If their objective is, as they claim, to keep thousands of people involved in a sport which is both fun and safe, then this plan is a disaster.

One question needs to be asked.  If I were to return to Oxford for some reason (and, before people worry, I have no plans of doing so), would I coach there?  I already hate the Isis, bumps racing, and the OURCs, but somehow I managed to coach out my time there despite several threats to quit.  But if I were now to have to jump through these bureaucratic hoops to be allowed to coach, then I would rather not.  And if I chose to ignore the OURCs, as I was often wont to do before (they did put one rule on the books when I was there which was directed specifically at me, but they never did fine me in four years coaching on the Isis), the new regulations would actually ban me as unqualified to coach.

I think that just about sums it up right there: yes, under the new rules I am unqualified.  So would be almost every good coach in the world that I know.  Some coaches may be willing to jump through the OURCs hoops, but most will not have the patience or the time.  And with fewer good coaches, the whole operation will become less safe.  But the bureaucrats will be happy.
 

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