Rowing, For All
It is such fun watching different coaches take athletes through their first day of learning to row. I think I coach it differently every time. The rowing stroke itself is pretty much identical anywhere you go -- the particulars of rowing technique can be controversial, but the basics are always the same. Legs, back, arms. Hip hinge. Grip. But how the beginners are introduced to the stroke is widely variable: What concepts are taught first? When does the talking and demonstrating become guided practice, and what is emphasized? How much practice versus how much talk? Which simple explanation is given for the "why" behind parts of the technique? Even the same coach on a different day will do these bits differently.1
On the first day of teaching someone to row, you have to choose your balance of how much information to give. You want to give them everything they really need. You want to give them some things beyond that too, things that will be handy or useful. But then this first day also feels like your one shot at introducing foundational or background things that are going to be important for them to know later, and critically, often aren't going to be offered in organized instruction later. Will they have a chance after day 1 to learn this particular vocabulary? Of course! But will it be delivered formally to the whole group, or will it have to be thrown in on an as-needed basis and thus you end up teaching it seven separate times? Will you get three days down the road and realize some of your kids know what a rigger is and some don't? As a result, it's difficult not to teach the stroke in a very definitions-heavy, dogmatic way. Here is everything about a rowing shell and everything about the sport of rowing, and also here is everything you'll need out on the water today, and here is why this is the right way, and here's everything about our team...
One alternative is to just do the "only what you need to know" version, which is an approach I tried to master for a long time. But if you try to do your 1) Orientation to the sport of rowing and 2) orientation to your boathouse and team culture while you are also trying to 3) introduce the rowing stroke in the same session, you'll talk ‘til you're hoarse and also run out of time. If you only do number 3 though, you'd better be organized about when they're getting 1 and 2 later on down the road. It's a tricky balance that I haven't figured out.
At ROW4ALL, you'll get a tiny bit of 1 but mostly 3. It's a great approach because Josip Stolar is not really building a team per se -- many people will go on from here to take a Learn To Row class somewhere else. This will teach them that they like rowing, and then they can go do it on a team if they'd like to.
Josip was the perfect person to be my first stop in Chicago. He loves to talk, he's been in Chicago a long time, but he isn't from here, so he talks about some things kind of explicitly while a native might take them for granted and not mention them at all.
The idea behind ROW4ALL is to get more people into rowing. It sounds like in the North Chicago suburbs you're either rowing with your high school or a competitive club if you're a youngster, but it's not so easy for other people to get into rowing. Parents, professionals, kids who can’t commit to 6 days per week. The whole idea of ROW4ALL is to lower the activation energy necessary to get into the sport. And what a perfectly simple way to begin! The dogma of rowing meets perfectly relaxed, low-key surfer beach vibes. There are two beach chairs and the ROW4ALL flag up on the sand, and 10 colorful Glide rowing boats rigged and ready for you. You're walking barefoot in the sand, standing in the waves, trying it out with your stern attached to a rope, and then the whole of Lake Michigan is yours. Never before has rowing been so similar to kayaking or stand-up paddleboarding.
On the morning that I met Josip, I took the train2 from my brother Tommy's house in the western suburb of Wheaton to the northern suburb of Winnetka. I walked in a glorious summer rain through a neighborhood of actual mansions called Winnetka. I learned that in Chicago the "villages" or suburbs are the size of neighborhoods, but they're actually tiny little cities! And they each have their own parks district, their own police, their own school district even. Winnetka's beach is Lloyd Beach, which includes the Stepan Family Boat Launch -- these are normally permit-only spaces for the people of Winnetka to use. To the South, Kenilworth or Wilmette have their own beaches, also private. If you want to go to the beach for free, you need to go to the city of Chicago (an hour-long train ride).
Also, it turns out there's quite a distinction between "city" and "suburb." Which strikes me as odd because as you're traveling through, the transition between the two is imperceptible -- functionally, it all feels like one giant Chicago. And even though there are public schools in this area that are very rich and very high-performing (New Trier High School is in Winnetka), it seems like there's also a distinction between public school kids and private school kids. I feel very much like a foreigner, sensing that there is subtext but aware that I'm not quite understanding what the subtext is. Chicagoans out there, can you educate me on this?
The awesome thing about ROW4ALL is that it's a "mobile boathouse," not confined to one neighborhood or one beach. It's like the All American Rowing Camp but smaller and simpler. My vanlife side geeked out on all the trailer's cute little storage systems and the compactness of it all.
But this means you can row in Winnetka one day, and at the boathouse on the canal the next, and then on the Skokie Lagoons the next! ROW4ALL can go anywhere -- and I mean truly anywhere, since the boats are fine in open water. No one else is rowing on Lake Michigan!
Other than first-day rowing coaching techniques and Chicago neighborhoods, here's the learning I think ROW4ALL offers:
One way to make rowing more equitable is to recruit more, using a wide brush, and just try to push all avenues harder. If you make rowing more popular, then a wider variety of people will be able to access it. The problem with that strategy is that the advantages and disadvantages from the wider culture are transferred directly to your club. Those will determine who is able to turn your recruiting into opportunity, who shows up at the front door, and who stays.
Another way is to target specific populations and create perks that make it possible for those populations to surmount barriers (offer a free rowing class for kids from a certain school, say, or provide transportation to one of the sessions of LTR camp). The problem with that strategy is that often it creates a situation where you have distinct groups or types of rowers on your team -- the rowers who are doing robotics twice a week and the ones who aren't, the rowers who are eligible to get a ride and those who aren't, the rowers who go to this camp and the kids who go to that camp. The hierarchies from our wider culture can sneak in there as well, and no one wants a situation where there are "normal" rowers and "other" rowers.
I think I'm on the cusp of learning of a third way, somewhere more effective than casting the wide net but more universal than providing accommodations for the small group. It seems like what ROW4ALL is doing is just taking rowing itself and changing it, making it easier, deleting things to make it more relaxed, lower-key. Making it simpler to start. ROW4ALL isn't necessarily concerned with the percentage of this or that identity who are getting into rowing... It is concerned with making rowing just plain easier to get into. If you can remove a barrier completely, you don't need to provide certain groups accommodation to surmount that barrier: You can just offer rowing to people. If you want All to be able to row, you don't want to do things that take away from the end goal: everyone rowing under the same umbrella, while also getting all their rowing needs met, including but not limited to needs based in their identity.
I know this is sensitive ground. We can't simply start pretending like barriers along lines of identity don't exist. Equity still means meeting different needs for different people. I'm picturing the equality-versus-equity diagram with the fence and the different-sized boxes:
I still can't see a way to make our sport equitable without targeting accommodations to specific populations. But the innovations that feel the strongest aren't the ones that make distinct groups and then treat them differently -- they're the ones where we get rid of the fence altogether, so no one needs a box in the first place!
Here's a nugget I learned from Josip at ROW4ALL: At the finish, to describe how far out or in the elbows should be in sculling, you can say "keep your forearms 90 degrees to the oar" which creates a nice efficient force-diagram image. Never thought of that before!
FOR THREE HOURS!!! The Chicago area is ENORMOUS!!