The Independent Rowing News

Photo: Tim McLaren, by Peter Spurrier

Steve Gladstone will take over coaching duties at the California Rowing Club on January 1, replacing U.S. head men’s coach Tim McLaren and two assistants. The move comes as the club’s principal financial backer, Levi Strauss chief executive T. Gary Rogers, seeks to return CRC to its founding vision and to restructure—though not reduce—his support of CRC and the men’s national team.

McLaren, who has been serving simultaneously as head coach of CRC and the national team, will continue to lead the U.S. squad. CRC will give up its designation as a USRowing National Training Center and most of the elite athletes based there have chosen to follow McLaren to the ARCO Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif., and then to Princeton for the summer season.

What will happen next is anyone’s guess. None of the CRC athletes expressed an interest in moving East. They remain fiercely loyal to McLaren, an Australian who came to the United States in 2006 to coach CRC and was tapped as U.S. head coach in February 2008. “Nobody wants to train full time in Princeton,” says 2009 U.S. single sculler Warren Anderson. “None of us have any aims on doing that. None of us."

Several of the CRC athletes have said McLaren is resisting pressure from USRowing to move his permanent seat of operations to Princeton. Reached in the coaching launch at the ARCO training center December 10, McLaren declined to comment about the reorganization in general or to speculate about his headquarters following the 2010 world championship campaign. “Kris [Korzeniowski], John Parker, and myself will base ourselves wherever there’s the greatest opportunity to teach,” he says. “I started [as U.S. coach] in February, and I was in Europe or Princeton from April to September."

The change in leadership originated with Rogers, who is the largest private donor to USRowing and a member of the governing body’s High-Performance Committee (HPC). The HPC did not take an active role in the decision, says USRowing chief executive Glenn Merry. “It’s Gary’s club. He can do what he wants with it.” Rogers will remain on the HPC, and his financial support of elite rowing will be unchanged from 2009 levels, though the mechanism will be different. Rogers will now provide two funding streams, one supporting CRC and the other earmarked for the men’s national team and administered by USRowing.

When Mike Teti took the Cal job vacated by Gladstone following the 2008 season, USRowing hired McLaren to become head coach of the national team. “The decision was made that Tim would kind of have a dual role,” Rogers says. “He would continue to lead the CRC but at the same time be the national coach. And in effect what happened—and I was OK with it—is that the CRC became subsumed into the USRowing effort.

“I’m just trying to reestablish the club that I originally founded, which I sort of gave to USRowing for a year because things came along very fast and I wanted Tim to be comfortable,” he says. “We sort of assumed that he could take on the USRowing responsibility and still keep the club going. And I think for a whole lot of reasons that was a bad judgment on my part.”

A cadre of elite scullers and rowers had been gathering at CRC since McLaren’s arrival in 2006. That group grew when McLaren took the USRowing job last year. The athletes sank down roots in the Bay Area, rented apartments, and built relationships. Some enrolled in graduate school or landed career-track jobs that allowed them the flexibility to train and compete. It was an idyllic situation for the athletes—superb facilities, a stable living environment, and personalized attention from one of the world’s best coaches. It’s no wonder they are angry that it has changed.

Most of the elites will follow McLaren, including 2008 Olympic scullers Wes Piermarini, Elliot Hovey, and Scott Gault, who stroked the U.S. quad to an electrifying World Cup win in Lucerne that year. Several told Rowing News that the decision to move came easily, though for many of them it will be a wrenching change. Piermarini is newly married, and his wife has a two-year work commitment in the Bay Area. They will live apart for most of that time.

“My guess is there will be damn few people here when we start up in January,” Gladstone says. “Most of the people training here will want to follow Tim. And, for the record, I fully understand that.” Some of those who will stay in the Bay Area say they would prefer to follow McLaren. About a dozen elites were training at CRC in November; in January the number is likely to be four, according to Anderson, who has a newly-signed 12-month lease, job, and family ties to the Bay Area. “It’s a little easier for me because I’m in the single,” he says. “But I’ve lost my coach and my training group.”

Assistant coaches Cam Kosioglous and Joel Scrogin also were terminated from CRC effective January 1. McLaren, his assistants, and most of the elite athletes decamped to Chula Vista in early December for a scheduled training camp, and will return there in January for the remainder of the winter. USRowing intends to hire Kosioglous as an assistant coach with some team-management duties in Princeton, Merry says. The organization has no plans to hire Scrogins.

McLaren will stay on as national team coach, despite a lackluster performance at the 2009 world championships in which the eight finished ninth and the best American men’s finish in the Olympic classes was fifth in the pair. “We think Tim’s the guy, and we’re going to stay with him,” Merry says. “We have a contract with him [through the 2012 Olympics] and he did exactly what we asked him to do, which is to put the best athletes in the smaller boats.”

It remains unclear whether the CRC will continue in its present role as a feeder program to the national team, or challenge the national system directly through small-boat trials. Gladstone says the answer will likely be a little of both. He doesn’t want to train athletes from September to April, only to hand them to the national team in piecemeal fashion. “Over the course of the year, let’s form boats,” he says. “Let’s see if we can get a pair, a double, a straight four. Let’s see if we can get distinction on the racecourse, and have the national team people, in this case Tim and Kris [Korzeniowski], say ‘this looks like the core of a good boat.’”

The national team system is already designed to accommodate this approach in small boats—though not in fours—with top finishers at the National Selection Regattas earning the chance to compete in U.S. colors at World Cup regattas. Those who finish well can continue to the world championships. Athletes embittered by the sudden move see Gladstone’s vision in a different light. “Does he want to work for the system or against it?” an athlete says. “Steve hasn’t been clear. He seems to want to work for it by working against it.”

The athletes first learned of the shakeup from McLaren in late November. They met the next morning with Gladstone, who invited them to continue at CRC under his leadership. “We asked if we could stay at CRC and follow Tim’s program,” one athlete recalls. “Steve said no."

Gladstone remembers the meeting differently. “I told them that those people who want to continue in the single exclusively can do that, and those of you who want to do both sweep and sculling can do that,” he says. “I did say that I’m not going to look up the national team training program every day and just follow that slavishly. I’m not going to be there just parroting what’s on a piece of paper any more than Tim would.”

No one has an unkind word to say about McLaren. Rogers calls him “the hardest-working guy I’ve ever seen.” Gladstone praises his technical abilities and rapport with athletes. The rowers have tremendous confidence in him. “I’ve learned more in two years with Tim than in the previous eight years,” says Hovey, a former Cal oarsman. Adds Anderson: “All the guys have faith that he’s the one to take us where we need to go.”

Rogers says that Gladstone did not ask to take over McLaren’s role at CRC, and that he was initially hesitant to do so. The coaching job is not permanent, he says. “I didn’t tell Gary I’m going to coach CRC forever. I’m committed to working through the transition and helping get the club that both Gary and I envisioned.”

Rogers says that athletes are welcome to train at the CRC’s Ky Ebright Boathouse, and the facility will be made available to the national team for training camps if they fit within Gladstone’s schedule.