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In his column for the October edition of the print magazine, Doctor Rowing writes, “Scratch any rower and he’ll tell you who helped him rise.”
That’s certainly the case with Olympic champion Pete Cipollone, winner of eight Olympic and worlds medals (five of them gold) back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the U.S. National Team ruled the world in eights.
Cipollone credits coach Mike Teti with “one of the most important pieces of coaching I ever got,” which you can read in October’s Coxing column by George Kirschbaum.
Teti continues to foster U.S. Olympic success, coaching at California Rowing Club, where most of the U.S. National Team men’s four and eight that won Olympic gold and bronze in Paris trained when they weren’t in USRowing selection camps or on training and racing trips.
Clubs provide essential opportunities and support for athletes outside of the schools and universities that expose most rowers to the sport for the first time. The head coaches (if not the assistants) of the top collegiate programs benefit from better pay owing in part to the salary surveys of their coaching associations, the Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association (for women’s programs) and the Intercollegiate Rowing Coaches Association (for men’s). Read more about it in the October issue of Rowing News.
As opportunities to walk on to a college varsity program as a novice disappear, clubs become an even more important part of our sport. Also in the October issue of Rowing News, Amy Wilton tells the instructive stories of the advent of several clubs founded through the passion of rowers bent on sharing the transformative power of our great sport with others.
May it inspire you to do the same.
