Meatheadedness By Any Other Name
I don’t care how many legendary coaches have said it - “Give me a guy with a big erg and I’ll teach him to row” is still among the dumbest things I’ve ever heard around a boathouse. Sounds confident though, right? And isn’t that step one? Well, sort of, but there are a couple of problems with proceeding from such a simple-minded, linear logic: Step 1 - Find the strong, fit, aggressive people. Step 2 - Tell them they’re going to be great rowers because they’re strong, fit, and aggressive and that’s what makes boats go fast. Step 3 - Teach them to row. Step 4 - Fast boats! Here’s an observation: The “give me a guy with a big erg and I’ll teach him to row” mentality goes hand in hand with an equally wrong-headed and equally common bit of boathouse nonsense: “technique makes up seats, horsepower makes up lengths.” The underlying assumption in both sayings is that technical proficiency is less important than fitness and thus only merits attention as a secondary thought. Find the horses, tell them you admire their strength and grit, and trust that they’ll figure it out - with your expert coaching help, of course.. But what if the main effect of that is limiting the field of people who should be interested in the sport to those who show initial promise based on stature and fitness alone? And what if the chosen strong, fit, aggressive people come to believe that since the sport is quote-unquote “90% fitness”, that they should only devote 10% of their attention to the comparatively minor matter of technical mastery, because all of that is implicit in the big erg worldview? This “big ergs only” assumption serves as a find-the-needle-in-the-haystack bottleneck - an “only big strong people need apply” chestnut that discourages people who don’t initially fit that mold. So what if that whole meatheaded attitude were replaced with something diametrically opposed to it? Something like “let’s teach tens of thousands of people to scull in singles and over the course of weeks, months, and years, the ones who are most willing to race outside their comfort zone will naturally emerge and develop into expert oarsmen and women.”? What if we realized that if you row enough miles, fitness follows as a natural consequence, but that if you allow yourself to row those miles badly, you won’t be nearly as fast as you would have been if you’d truly devoted yourself to mastery of the sculling motion? But by all means, keep relying on erg times to tell you who does and does not have potential. Keep producing crews that could be lengths and lengths faster if they were full of athletes who know the value of small boats and the limitations of believing that the sport is almost all fitness. Yes, it is. All but the most critical element.
