My own college coach used to talk about the rowing stroke as being similar to the Fourth of July picnic pastime of squeezing watermelon seeds between thumb and forefinger until they shoot forward at your target–typically that annoying little brother. It must be done carefully and deliberately. A good catch is like peeling a banana or putting on your pants: it can’t be done quickly.
Breaking with widely accepted vocabulary, he said that a “quicker catch” is not the goal. Al Rosenberg, the renowned coach of the 1964 Olympic gold-medal eight and 1974 world champions, talked about how the motion of putting the blade into the water is like rolling an orange off a table and snatching it before it falls to the ground. Some coaches use analogies and metaphors to get across what they want their athletes to do in the boat. Larry talked about the entry and release, not the catch and finish.ĭo these small linguistic choices make a coach great? I doubt it, but they do reflect the care and seriousness with which coaches instruct their athletes. Once you begin to row, there is no finish. Calling the moment when the oar handles touch the body and the blades come out of the water “the finish” disrupts the cycle.
Each stroke is connected to the next one. He hated the term “the finish” because it implies that each stroke has an end point, and Larry wanted to make sure that his athletes and the coaches he talked to at clinics across the country understood that the rowing stroke is a cycle. The precision of these words conveys his passion for making the most minute matters important.Īnother great coach, the beloved Larry Gluckman, had his own concern about the language of coaching rowing. I remember hearing him talk with athletes about the “insertion” and “extraction” of the blade, not the catch and finish. Some of Ted Nash’s vocabulary has always amused me. Although most of us use video to show examples of what we want, you can’t just roll the tape and have the athlete figure it out. How a coach chooses to explain and teach the rowing stroke is one of the most important elements of their job. I spent a lot of time talking to people about last month’s feature on Ted Nash, and it got me thinking, again, about the role of rowing coaches.Ĭoaches are teachers. As a rowing coach myself, I like to think about what other coaches do–not just drills and workouts but how they work with their athletes and peers.
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