In the US, we are used to having a coach who runs the program - someone who thinks long-term and makes all the technical decisions, including decisions of line-ups and training schedules. Even big university clubs in Britain have traditionally relegated their coaches to a somewhat limited status. The captain or president makes the crucial decisions, with the coach there only to provide suggestions. Not uncommonly, the captain will select the members of the crew and their line-ups, and often determine the training program. This leads to short-term thinking, and often to decisions being made by people less qualified to make them than the coach. It also means that the coaching staff can change drastically from year to year (or even within a year), thereby destroying continuity. A large number of coaches have complained to me about the make-up of the crew or even the seating arrangement, and when challenged they lament that it was the captain who wanted his friends on board and wanted himself in the stroke seat, and that if the coach disagreed he’d get another coach. I once coached a program where every day the captain tried to tell me what workout she wanted to do and what she thought the technique should be, quite in opposition to what I felt the crew needed - that coaching arrangement lasted under three weeks. Most famously, one year the President of the Oxford Men’s Heavyweights sacked the coaching staff two weeks before the Boat Race because the coaches wanted to remove a close friend from the crew (granted that friend was perhaps one of the best rowers in the crew and certainly the toughest, but the coaches felt he wasn’t blending well with the rest of the crew - a decision someone from the coaches' perspective should be entitled to make).
What, I wondered, was the purpose of even having a coach.
Another problem British collegiate crews have is over-coaching. I trained one Winter with the Oxford Men’s Heavies, and we had ten distinct coaches. Although a Head Coach wrote the overall program, every day I worked with someone new and every day my crew got different information. While it is good to have extra eyes on a crew, the observations of other coaches should get filtered through a single voice (or, that of small group of like-minded coaches, if time and monetary constraints do not permit a single coach). Train coxswains right and they can act as the crucial extra eyes. But, as often is the case in Britain, if the main decisions are made by the captains, it is not necessary to always have the same person (or small coaching staff) looking after the crew, so the captain may turn to several independent and non-coordinated coaches. I do not think this is a good idea.
There is also a trend in Britain to have one coach (or set of coaches) per crew, rather than a head coach and assistants as in America. Who is in each crew gets determined afresh every term (and there are three terms in the British academic calendar). This makes for a very disjointed program. It also produces a lack of communication throughout the squad. Ideally, even if time and budget constraints do limit the availability of a head coach to handle multiple crews, at least the coaching staff must work together and the head coach must keep an eye on all of the crews in order to best craft a long-term plan. Sometimes this is as simple an affair as to spot and promote young talent which otherwise might get left on a lower boat. Squad systems are not commonplace enough during the Fall and Winter, yet they would elevate the level of the whole squad most efficiently and would produce faster crews across the board once final line-ups get set in April.
Coaching in America is a much more professional and complete affair, even at small club-status collegiate programs. I think it is recognized that if a program is to succeed, there needs to be the consistency that can best come from the independent and long-term view of a coach. The captain’s role is merely to encourage the squad. If, like in the case of all British collegiate programs, it is a club (as opposed to varsity-status, the term American collegiate athletics uses to describe programs fully supported by their universities and administered out of the athletics department), then the role of the president and the board to administer it as well. But coaching decisions need to be left to the coach.
Captains in England tend to be too concerned with winning at the moment. If they are not immediately gratified, then they put pressure on the coach or even change coaches mid-program. Coaches need to have the autonomy to think not just about the day’s practice, but also where the crews will be come next racing season and where the program will be for the next several years down the line. A good coach is useful for providing a long-term picture which rowers do not have - especially since collegiate rowers who may take on positions of leadership in their clubs within a year of learning to row tend not to be able to view the circumstances from outside the boat nor do they have the experience. When I was in England, the Oxford Women’s Heavyweights fired their coaches every single year. The coaches they brought on were invariably excellent, but, unable to pursue the big picture, they were often stymied. When they didn’t beat Cambridge (superbly coached by the same staff for many years), both because Cambridge had the better long-term program and because Oxford often did not even allow its coaches short-term decisions, they simply got angry at the coach and started over. Again: why even have coaches?
American programs tend to be built around coaches. Successful British programs are usually as well. A Head Coach handles the bulk of the coaching, including having at least a hand in the novices (how much depending on the size of the program). Since the US collegiate racing circuit has a "Freshman" category for first-year rowers, the larger programs generally do have separate coaches for freshmen and novices. In many cases these coaches themselves have tremendous backgrounds - several current or former US national team coaches work with freshmen. This is true, I might add, even at the small-college level (the winning freshman heavyweight crew at the Dad Vail National Championship last year, for example). I have enormous respect for my colleagues over here and the way they approach the profession.
Since most collegiate crews in England do not treat their coaches with the deference they should, many coaches in England cannot be bothered to care enough about their crews or involve themselves in the planning of the boat clubs. A lot of people who have no credentials to coach end up coaching (go down to the Isis and count how many novice crews are being coached by second-year rowers from the previous year’s second eight of the opposite sex - sometimes these are good coaches but more often they are not), and this perpetuates the system. Often there is a lack of communication between coaches working on the same crew, and even between coaches of different crews. Thus many college programs in England become disjointed and directionless.
What I did, first at Lady Margaret Hall and then at Wolfson, was to take over the guidance of a collapsed program and build it up. When the need came, this meant bringing on able assistants. Both programs have now turned over head coaches twice since I left, but the basic implant remains. There will be up years and down years based on the talent of the current batch of rowers and what the coach is able to do with them - but that is incidental. What is important is that the programs be consistently competitive, something they can be once the program is in place.
It is interesting to note the case of the Wolfson men. The men pulled themselves up on the coat-tails of the women’s revival, and - not coincidentally - were aided in this by attracting an excellent development coach (Catherine Hawkins, who had been LMH’s men’s development coach and a key ingredient in many years of successful LMH men's crews, and whom I managed to poach - inadvertently at first - for the Wolfson men). My advice to the Wolfson men when I was over there in June was simple: find a head coach. This coach must oversee the direction of the program with a long term vision. Even if the coach will not be in Oxford for ever, it is still important that the coach be thinking of where the program will be when he is gone. Rather than splitting the year up into terms, the coach must set out to provide a full-year plan, aimed to peak at the right time in late May and hopefully continue on for Henley should the talent be there. In Catherine, there is already an excellent development coach to work with the Novice A crew and keep the First Eight tidy during the Fall and the Second Eight during the Spring - a role she used to play at LMH and which she prefers to being the Head Coach. A new Head Coach would need to be able to work with her, help with all the novice crews and keep an eye on the lower boats through the year - knowing, of course, that Catherine would be doing an excellent job. The Head Coach would especially concentrate on producing a fast First Eight to peak in May. With such an organization, the Captain could concentrate on inspiring the squad, and the squad could begin to think more long-term rather than term-by-term. I do not honestly think that the Wolfson men, despite the small set-back of a season they had last year, are all that far behind the women.
The key ingredient is coaching. It is important to bring in a good coach, but that is not enough. The new coach must be given the autonomy necessary to produce a program successful in the long term. A coach needs the authority to consider not just the day's practice, but where the squad will be later on this term, where it will be at the end of this academic year, where it will be in three years, and where it will be after he is gone and a new coach comes in.