We are grateful to James Pitt for the following article. He was Captain of Boats at MCS in 1992, and is now at Washington College, USA, where he was voted most valuable oarsman last year by fellow members of his club. His rowing this year has been curtailed by an injury sustained while taking part in another sport. This is the first newsletter article to have reached the Secretary by electronic mail.
I row on a stretch of water Called the Chester River, this is a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. This strecth can be compared to the Tideway up in London. Although we can generally find shelter around one corner or another, there is no real shelter as there was on the Limpley Stoke stretch of the Avon. This makes things very difficult for an oarsman from a background such as Monkton.
The training methods in the US are very different to what I had experienced in the UK. The first major difference that I noticed, was that there was no coaching as such. Sure, the "coaches" would come out and supervise what we would be doing on a specific day, but there is no one-on-one tuition on the water. In fact you would be lucky to get any at all. I have heard coaches here say, 'you are a good enough rower to correct your own faults now'. It was my experience that 'oarmsen always revert to type.' This lack of coaching is probably due to the fact that the coaches here are professionals. They get paid for coaching: perhaps they do not do it for the love of the sport unlike some people I have come across.
Many of the days are spent training twice a day and for a total of 4 hours. The morning practice is usually technique training. Since we don't get coached this comprises of a fleet of shells going out for a 60% row doing three 20 minute pieces. The afternoon outings are usually more vigorous. A great deal of time is spent sculling in the off season and hardly any time is spent in sweep oared boats. In fact if there was a race in an eight, it is most likely that all the days building up to that race would be spent in sculls. This seems to have its advantages and obvious disadvantages. I think that most crews in England wouldn't dream of that.
Another major difference is how the Ergometer is used over here. If the coach decides that we are not going out on the water, the ergs will be lined up one behind the other and used just like a boat. All the oarsmen follow the stroke. From here timed pieces would be conducted, pause drills drilled, in fact anything that you would usually do in a boat. The usual routine is nine times 2000m at 80% of your maximum on the erg. The coach here at Washington College is a boatman for the US national team, and obviously picked up some training methods from there.
Since the USA is so vast, there is a great deal of travelling involved to get to the regattas. Since the Washington College is about 11/2 hours from Washington DC, we find that we generally leave at 5 am to get to most of our races. This is largely because the coaches' and coxes' meetings are scheduled for unsociable hours of the morning.
Whereas a great deal of races in the UK are side by side races, it is easy to notice that here everything has to be done bigger and better. For example, I have been to some races where there have been 35 entries for a race. That is the type of entry numbers you would expect for some events at Henley Royal Regatta. The smallest race I have experienced is a six lane race. The largest is about an eight lane race. That is like going up to the National Schools Regatta and finding that the Holme Pierrepoint reservoir has been expanded by another two lanes. Quite a shock to the system.
Other differences in the races involve the division structure of the athletes here. In the UK the not so talented race against the talented. Here the smaller schools race aginst the smaller schools and the larger school such as Yale, Harvard and Brown University race in their own division. There are certain regattas that apply to each division. So for instance Eton, Hampton, Shiplake, etc., would be in division 1. I guess Monkton would be in division 3 or so. The division 1 schools would have their own regattas and the division 3 schools would have their own. The only time when these divisions would meet would be at the National Championships.
On the big scale, there is a lot of politics involved in Rowing in the US and only after having experienced this can one understand why Oxford had such a controversy with the Americans in the build up to the Boat Race in 1987. If you want to know why, I'll tell you in another article - (yes, please - editor.).
There is great emphasis on safety. Since the coaches stand a higher chance of being sued for the slightest thing, it is in their best interest that we do not go out on the water if the wind is blowing, or if the water is choppy. I can remember days on the water at Monkton where it was so cold that the water on the loom of the oar would freeze before the begining of the next stroke. Not here. It does however get that cold, but we are not allowed to practise in those conditions. There is a risk of pneumonia, so therefore we don't go out. All in all, my experience of rowing in the USA has been one of extreme frustration.