A Model Worth Emulating

Suppose you wanted to find out about some big race from the past. Perhaps the 1956 Olympic eights, won by Yale, representing the USA, the only crew ever to win after coming through the reps?

What about a couple of the most dramatic come-from-behind races ever seen at Henley, the one-foot victories of Shrewsbury in 2007 and Harvard in 2012?

Or descriptions of the many IRA-winning crews of Steve Gladstone, whether at Brown, Cal, or Yale?

Did Temple win the Dad Vail every year in the ’70s and ’80s? It certainly seemed like it.

How many consecutive times did the U.S. women’s eight win the world championships?

Has anyone ever beaten Winsor, Belmont Hill, or Deerfield for the points trophy at the New England Interscholastic Rowing Championships?

It’s not easy to find out about specific crews from the past. If you’re lucky, you can get bare-bones results on row2k.com, but even that superb website goes back to only 1997. Bill Miller’s rowinghistory.net site covers Henley winners and U.S. National Teams. World Rowing has an archive of world-championship and Olympic results. And perhaps certain colleges have an article or two on their websites.

There are books, of course. I continue to urge my rowers to read Brad Lewis’s Olympian to discover what it takes to win an Olympic gold in a double scull after being cut from camp. The Yale lightweights put out an excellent recap of their 100-year history. And Göran Buckhorn’s website, Hear the Boat Sing, has fascinating pieces of rowing history. But considering all the exciting races contested over the years and all the outsize personalities in rowing, there aren’t many readily accessible sources that do justice to our sport’s rich history.

We know that Dan Brown’s superb The Boys in the Boat has spiked tremendous interest in the sport. And the release of the film version on Christmas Day should take this to another level. But there is more to rowing history than just the magnificent University of Washington crew of 1936.

Is there a model for how rowing history should be celebrated and preserved? Yes, there is. The University of Washington’s history is documented on Huskycrew.org, a site that every rowing program in the country should emulate.

The website came online in 2003 and is the work of a tireless researcher and writer, Eric Cohen, who coxed the Washington varsity for three years before graduating in 1982.

Cohen hadn’t planned on becoming a rowing historian, but, as he said, “I wanted to give back. It’s a labor of love, where good things always start. And this project has been so much fun. Where else can you meet guys who rowed 70 years ago and have a connection? That’s what this sport is about.”

Although there had been some rowing at Washington earlier, the first Washington-California race took place in 1903. To celebrate the centennial on Opening Day in 2003, Cohen proposed to the board of stewards that he write a history.

“Let’s see,” Cohen thought. “I’ve got eight months to cover a hundred years. If I can cover three years each week, I can probably do it.”

Three years per week did do it. These aren’t results summaries; they are full-blown write-ups of each season.

For 1970, Cohen wrote about the founding of the Opening Day regatta:

Meanwhile, Dick Erickson had been working with the Seattle Yacht Club and Seafirst Bank (now Bank of America) to tie crew races into the annual boat parade on the Montlake Cut. UCLA, the top antagonist of the Huskies on the West Coast for five years, accepted Erickson’s invitation to participate in this unknown and untested event that would become known simply as “Opening Day.”

On May 3rd, the event went off on a sunny day in front of an estimated 50,000 fans lining the log boom and the Montlake Cut. The JV’s, in a furious finish, came from behind to defeat the Bruins by about a half-length. In the featured event of the day, UCLA shot out of the gate to lead early in the race—with Washington getting a typically slow start—then slowly drew away and led by six seats with 500 meters to go.

But at that point, the Huskies began to sprint, rapidly closing the lead. The crews crossed the finish line almost dead even, both timed in 6:04.9, but there was enough margin to call UCLA the victors. Jerry Johnsen, Washington class of ‘64 and now head coach at UCLA, noted, “It’s nice to come home to a city that knows what crew is and get a welcome like this before such a big crowd.” Dick Erickson was notably silent (at least publicly) other than to call the first-time event a “majestic sight.”

The Huskies went on to win the IRA; early races don’t prove everything.

In 2022, on the 50th anniversary of Title IX, Cohen, realizing that the site was weak on women’s rowing, dug deep into the archives and, along with Ellen Ernst, produced some of the best coverage of the early days of women’s rowing I’ve seen.

In the introduction to the expanded women’s rowing pages, they wrote:

The magnitude of what these women, along with their coach, were accomplishing by maintaining a daily regimen of rowing at a university at this time cannot be understated. In 1907, Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States; Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona…were not states, and women could not vote. There were two women’s rowing programs active at U.S. universities at the time: Washington and Wellesley. Women’s athletics were not only unsupported in the majority of the country, they were often admonished as unhealthy for women, particularly in endurance and aerobic sports.

Hiram Conibear [legendary coach Hiram Conibear, hired as an athletic trainer for all sports, including men’s rowing, supported and coached women’s crews enthusiastically] did not agree with that sentiment. He encouraged women to row and fought for it multiple times, even risking his job by ignoring an administration that saw women’s rowing as dangerous and unflattering to women.

Women’s rowing was canceled by upper campus more than once, but each year would come back with the blessing of Conibear, to the point that by 1913 he was hiring a woman to be the women’s head coach. And although formal competition (once a year) was limited to “form contests” by class (with judges awarding points for composure, synchronicity, posture, and bladework), informal competition was completely different.

As we know from testimonials, that was less an annual event, but much better described as a consistent event. When the women headed out onto Lake Washington or Lake Union—and this is particularly true after 1912 when the program had more shells—they went head to head, full slide, full power.

Cohen concludes:

It would be Conibear, outspoken and passionate, who would lead the women’s program into its heyday, and Conibear’s untimely absence that would lead to a 50-year hiatus in this highly popular sport at Washington.

Readers, if this “untimely absence” is mysterious, you need to read more history. Hiram Conibear, probably the most influential American coach in the first half of the 1900s, died at 46 in 1917 after falling out of a plum tree.

Dip into it. You will be rewarded. It covers 100 plus years of Husky crews—and not just results but paragraphs and photos from every year since 1903. Few programs have an historian as talented and selfless as Cohen, and it’s something every program needs. The 1936 Olympics aren’t the only great story to share.