The Rowing News Interview: Tom Rooks

Rowing News: What’s your new job?

My job is Director of Safeguarding, which puts a few things under my team’s tent. I still have the priorities with safety that I did prior to this position. I’m responsible for getting safety communication and education out there, and looking at ways to reduce harm from a physical-safety perspective.

But what’s changed is that SafeSport, grievance procedures, and the Referee Corps, those things are now with our team. And that all came with the development of the vision toward safeguarding. The easy way to explain it is: Let’s reduce harm. Sometimes that’s physical, sometimes it’s mental.

If that’s a kid who hates the sport or is unable to stand up straight, if that’s from hazing on a high-school team, or if that’s from not listening to your body and seeing a doctor, the harm is the same. So what we’re trying to go after is: “Where are there places where we can reduce harm while still letting rowing deliver all the great lessons and experiences that it has to offer?”

Before I became the Director of Safeguarding, I was the Safety and Well-Being Associate. And then I was the Director of Sport Safety, which was kind of the same role with a bit of a promotion. And then what really happened was the more you look into the incidents we have in our sport—be it drownings, collisions, abuse, all those things—a lot of the harm comes from the same lack of curiosity about how to evaluate risk and do the right things to reduce it.

Rowing News: Before you came to USRowing, you served in the United States Coast Guard. Tell us about that.

Yes, I’m a 22-year active-duty veteran. I’m a retired Senior Chief, and ironically enough, my last job in the Coast Guard was running the school for all of our coxswains. So anyone who wanted to become a Boatswain’s Mate—the trade of driving boats on rescues and law-enforcement missions—they had to get through our schoolhouse.

I got involved with USRowing [laughing], I blame Chris Chase for my job at USRowing. He called me one day because we were friends and said, “Can you help out with safety?” And I said, “Sure.” Chris Chase gets you motivated, and the next thing you know you find yourself contributing.

Rowing News: SafeSport certainly has some limitations, as we found out the hard way with some coaches who were in the news. USRowing had its hands tied with how much could be done. Where does safeguarding go beyond that?

So the beauty of safeguarding is we can look for where there are overlaps and where there are gaps and we can fill them.

A good example is if you were at a regatta and your coach refused to let you wear a jacket and the regatta was two hours behind and 40 degrees with the wind blowing 20 miles an hour. If you think about it, we have a SafeSport incident, right? We also have a non-contact physical misconduct, but you also have a safety incident. You also possibly have a referee complaint and you might have disagreements on your hands. By unifying all these processes and concerns under safeguarding, we can take a look at a given scenario and find out what best applies to mitigate it and better find all of the lessons learned.

I’m a firm believer that, outside of a character-driven mistake, a lot of people make mistakes we should learn from and help them learn from. I made a lot of mistakes as a young coach. And one of the things with that is finding where there are avenues and outlets where we can learn and spread the lessons learned, so the next person doesn’t have to make the same mistake.

There are a lot of people who have experienced something that they shouldn’t have, and they don’t know what to do with it. We can’t expect a 15-year-old rower to know what should be a local club problem to resolve and what should be reported to SafeSport. So there are two aspects for me to safeguarding: prevention and response. We have a partnership with WeRideTogether, and they have a really good education module up on The Launch [USRowing’s online-learning platform] right now that people can take for free. It teaches them what is a healthy relationship with your coach and what is unhealthy.

We’re trying to find more tools, especially on the prevention side. With response, we have SafeSport requirements we follow and we don’t have the option to say “no, thanks,” and do things our own way. There are certain cases that are mandatory to go to them, and their processes are rightfully very defined. But on the prevention side, having the safeguarding concept in place really gives us a lot of freedom to do better education, like our annual safety report. If somebody reads that and sees that last year we had a lot of regatta incidents with uncoxed boats hitting each other, then maybe they say, “Let’s put it in a training plan for whomever is going to steer a quad or double.” And maybe that prevents the next person from getting run over out there or having their boat destroyed.

Rowing News: We’ve been talking about the human costs of safety issues, but there’s also a financial cost, right?

I was pretty proud of how open we were about the insurance problems we faced last year. The original quotes we got from carriers were just an astronomical price increase from where we had been just a year before. And the really direct truth of it is what we call SAM coverage, sexual assault and molestation. A lot of carriers are pulling out of the U.S. market because with the amount of revelation of what’s happening in youth sports and what has happened over the years, it’s getting pretty hard for insurance providers to feel like they have any understanding of what next year may hold.

The thing I like about my job is, it’s the right thing to do morally and ethically to reduce harm, but it’s also the survival of our sport. If things keep going—and it’s not just rowing, it’s across sports—but if things keep going this direction, if you don’t find a way to reduce bullying, abuse, molestation, all these things that are happening, if we don’t fight this like it’s an existential threat, it’s going to change the rowing landscape.

So many people have done so much good work in the 30 years I’ve been involved at opening up our sport to community programs, getting out of just the private, well-funded schools and into more places people can row. If our insurance costs start doubling every year, those are the programs that go away. Your local rowing club, that’s who will go away if we can’t get our heads around this to start reducing harm in the sport.

Rowing News: What’s your vision? What will you look back at and say, “That’s where I really moved the needle?”

When a tragedy happens in our sport, I want to be surprised. Right now, throughout our sport’s history, when things have happened, I find myself and a lot of people I know going, “Well, it was only a matter of time.” I want to be surprised. When I was in the Coast Guard, I lost shipmates. I lost friends. The goal was when we read about the mishap that we couldn’t have imagined it would have happened.

So for me, however long I’m able to endure, however long this career goes, when I walk away, I want to have a professional culture that looks at risk. I talk a lot about this concept: I’m pro-risk. I’m anti-chance. Risk, we can look at. We can calculate. We can mitigate it. Chance is when we see the risk and go, “Well, hopefully, it’s OK.”

We owe each other more than that.

Further reading from the Rowing News Safety Issue

• Clear and Present Dangers
• Never Swim to Shore, and Other Safety Rules
• The Rowing News Interview: Tom Rooks