Small Boats Beat Phat Ergs

Listen - I know I’ve said this before and that I’m swimming upstream with it in the United States, but the idea that you can hope to make a meaningful contribution to a really fast 8+, 4-, or 4X before you have even achieved reasonable competence in a 1X or 2- is delusional. So let me put it even more emphatically: joining a four or eight-oared team boat before you can row a two-oared shell well is like thinking you can join an orchestra before you’ve learned to play an instrument. Until you have learned to play a solo instrument well yourself, you are a liability to any ensemble group of musicians, and the same is true of so-called big boats. “I’m not good in singles or pairs but I’m really good in fours and eights” is a self-serving excuse for acceptance of mediocrity even if you have somehow convinced yourself that it isn’t. “I can’t play the cello myself but I should be in the orchestra because I sound great in a group setting” is a manifestly absurd statement. Every really fast team boat I’ve ever coached or rowed in as an athlete has been entirely composed of rowers and scullers who are pretty slick in singles and/or pairs. That there are fast eights with people in them who haven’t rowed a lot of singles or pairs proves nothing - they’d be even faster if they had.

So why does the delusion persist? I believe there are two primary reasons. 1) The long-standing idea that you get the best bang for the buck with eights and ergs. Most programs, whether based within a club or a varsity athletic department, don’t have unlimited budgets, so we carry on buying eights and ergs to get the greatest number of bodies in seats, and this works to the detriment of small boat mastery and optimal big boat speed. 2) A dearth of coaches who are comfortable coaching small boats, which has a similar effect. As recently as 2017, I still didn’t quite know what I was looking at when trying to coach a pair. Coaching at the Episcopal School of Dallas and Craftsbury had equipped me well to work with singles, but pairs remained a mystery, and I’ve still only begun to scratch the surface in that regard. Just diving into it at Jesuit College Prep and watching Green Racing Project pairs over the last few years has helped, as has Ric Ricci’s always-outside-the-box perspective that “a single is just a squashed-together pair and a pair is just an elongated single with a different person rowing each side.”

There needs to be a profound paradigm shift in the way we develop rowers and scullers in this country, and it starts with small boats. Don’t let the “it’s too expensive” argument sway you. Don’t let “we don’t have time” sway you. And above all, don’t let “you can’t just throw people in singles and expect that to make your eights faster” sway you. Though true, it’s also irrelevant, because that’s not what is being proposed. We aren’t going to just launch singles and pairs. We’re going to coach them. Start today. Contact me. I’ll help. We’re all still learning.