Men's Rowing in the US

Looking Past Tradition into The Future (Part 2)

Matt Miller at the Chula Vista Olympic Training Center in 2015

For an intro to the series, see Editors Note: row2k Series on the Intersection of U.S. Men's Collegiate and Elite Rowing

Matt Miller had a plan.

He was enjoying his time rowing at the University of Virginia and was hoping to continue his career post-graduation, but after struggling to be noticed as a junior national team candidate and being cut from a under-23 U.S. men's sculling camp, Miller decided against accepting an invitation to train in a men's pair for the final 2012 Olympic trials, or to join another under 23 camp.

He was keenly aware that the initial path to the national team was a "big erg score," something he was moving toward, but he had little confidence he could win in a trials boat and make the London Olympic pair. "I was going decently fast on the erg in the spring of 2012, but I thought, 'The Olympics are not going to work out for me'," he said.

To be clear, Miller did want to row in the Olympics. But at the same time there were other pressing needs – like earning money to pay for his education, the out of pocket costs most college club athletes pay to row in college, and the funds to survive if he did earn a place at the national team training center in Princeton, N.J.

He decided instead to go to the Henley Royal Regatta with Virginia and develop a plan he felt would land him on the best path to rowing past college.

For Miller, it worked out nicely. He finished his collegiate career and then trained on his own, working on both his overall fitness and small boat skills. He sculled at the Potomac Boat Club, moved through the various levels of the USRowing selection process, and earned and saved money.

Ultimately, when he moved into the U.S. system he earned a place in the men's eight in both the 2014 and 2015 world championships, and was selected to represent the U.S. at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games in the men's four, a top priority boat for the U.S.

Miller's story and path to the national team is an example of the issues collegiate club athletes face if they want to row on a national team, and is a guide to where the best prospective rowers in the U.S. men's rowing community can be found – in the traditional Division I Intercollegiate Rowing Association schools, or in the club system, or a combination of both.

For athletes in the club programs, the question is often if they are able to pursue a national team or even to be noticed, and if the system is prepared to help them develop their potential if they are.

Through the last two Olympic cycles, the top collegiate programs were well represented on the men's national teams. Of the 21-man roster that competed in Rio, 19 were from top DI schools, including Brown, California, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Navy, Stanford and Washington.

Only three rowed in collegiate clubs or in small Dad Vail sized programs such as Drexel University, UC-Davis, and Virginia.

In looking for national team prospects, there is a perception that the best candidates are limited to those that row in Division I programs. But history, and the number of clubs and small collegiate programs that exist, suggest something different.

And it is important to note that the priority boat for Rio, the men's four, was split evenly between the two, with two collegiate club graduates in Miller and Seth Weil (UC-Davis), and two Ivy League graduates (Henrik Rummel and Charlie Cole).

But looking just at the numbers of program to choose athletes from, at the 2016 American Collegiate College Rowing Association championships alone, 64 schools competed. There were 24 IRA schools at the 2016 championships.

"The athletes are out there, rowing in collegiate programs of every level and in the U.S. club system," said Gregg Hartsuff, head men's coach at Michigan, a club program. "Every year, there's a graduating class with plenty of guys that have the potential to be an elite oarsman."

Identification and Development

The idea that there is a large enough athlete pool available in the overall U.S. collegiate system is not new, and it has been proven true before.

When former national team coach and current Cal head coach Mike Teti took over as the head U.S. men's coach in 1997, he was facing a challenge of rebuilding the post Atlanta Olympic men's team. "When I got to Princeton, we had only four guys, and none of them had ever been on the team before."

Teti said his answer was to troll the collegiate programs and find enough undergraduates to fill out his crews. "I spent most of the year going around the schools looking at kids," he said. "We had a lot of undergraduates on the team that year. But that's fine; you start with a small group and then you build out."

The U.S. men's eight won at the World Championships that year and for the next two years. But his eight stumbled at the 2000 Games, in part because the men's four failed to qualify at the proceeding World Championships in 1999 and the focus to qualify them at the last chance qualifier was an overall drain, Teti said.

The U.S. men won one medal that Olympiad, a silver in the straight pair (they also won the coxed four and coxed pair at the non-Olympic Worlds).

But when the team reconvened the following year and at the start of the 2004 Athens cycle, Teti said he had a stable of athletes to build on, while continuing to find more in the collegiate ranks.

"I spent a lot of my time traveling around visiting programs," he said. "If I went up to Boston, I'd spend the week up there and maybe go out with (different teams) a few times, so I got to see not just the top kids but the kids that were coming up."

He said he communicated with and encouraged athletes from smaller schools and club programs to consider rowing for the U.S. By the time he got to the Athens' Games, the U.S. was the top big boat crew in the world again. The eight set a world best time in the heats that held until 2012 (it is still the Olympic record), and won the Olympic gold medal.

That crew was made up mostly of athletes from smaller or club programs.

Of the 2004 crew, Bryan Volpenhein rowed at Ohio State, Jason Read rowed at Temple, a Dad Vail school, Dan Beery rowed at Tennessee at Chattanooga, Wyatt Allen rowed at Virginia, and Joey Hansen rowed at Oregon State; it also included a walk-on in Beau Hoopman from Wisconsin.

2004 Olympic Eight

"I think there are plenty of American kids out there still," Teti said. "I don't think there is any shortage. Look at some of the eights we had."

From Club to Selection

Hartsuff sees scouting the collegiate system for potential as a critical component for a national team that is looking for a large pool of athletes – but he and other club coaches say, club rowers already have daunting financial barriers before they are even discovered or decide to invest in the possibility of a long, penniless selection process.

The idea of foregoing a career and earning money to chase a dream while faced with sometimes overwhelming student debt after completing - and personally funding, in many cases - a collegiate career without the benefit of a scholarship or financial aid package, is a hindrance to club athletes.

"If you compare a club rower to a guy from an Ivy League school that has financial aid or a guy that went to (a Division one program) and earned a full scholarship, the one guy has student debt, plus he has spent X amount of money out of pocket to finance his rowing, and the other guy who is just coming out of an environment where all he has to do is show up and row. That makes a difference," said University of Virginia head men's coach, Frank Biller.

"A male club rower has much more of an urge to go get a job to at least pay off the student debt versus a lot of varsity guys, because the varsity guys don't have the kind of out of pocket expenses that a club guy does.

"Most guys thoroughly enjoy their four year college rowing experience and move on," Biller said.

And while there is wide agreement that the club system is fertile ground for finding potential national team athletes, the issues those athletes face are not just financial.

They have to deal with the realities and perceptions of having rowed in a system not generally recognized as being a top collegiate program, or one that has a coaching staff insufficient for development.

Perception versus Reality

The perception for many club rowers is that they are at disadvantage when it comes to being invited to a national team selection camp, Biller said.

"That is just the impression they have. If you are coming out of a club, especially as a walk-on guy, you have to be so much faster than if you come out of Washington or Cal or Harvard or whatever other program. I personally cannot say if that is true or not, but it is sort of irrelevant because that is the impression they get."

Biller added that a compounding issue is that the perception can sometimes become reality.

"When you have two guys that are similar on the erg, then the guy that comes out of the big program most likely has the advantage. And that is just how it is."

Biller said he feels that no matter what the reality, it takes a mature and thoughtful athlete to come out of a club system. The required numbers – erg scores – are not a mystery. A serious national team athlete needs a 2k score under six minutes as a baseline, and a score up to 10 seconds faster than that to be in contention to make a national team crew.

"To be honest, if you have a kid that goes six minutes in college and has the potential to be a national team athlete, they have to figure that out themselves," Biller said. "Every guy I have ever had that was potentially a national team rower knew to look at what the right steps were for them."

Miller was one of those, and Biller watched him figure that out.

"First of all, he had the genes. He's just an incredible body. But he is also extremely smart, and he's one of the only guys that followed the training program to the detail. When he was with me, I knew at the end of his third year that he could be potentially good, and I knew in the fourth year where he could go.

"He's not perfect, but he's pretty damn close. And he had a plan. There was nothing given to him that mapped out what the next four years would look like.

"Matt sat down and made a plan. He would reach out to people for input, but he made a plan where he would work on his training and put money aside. He trained at 75 percent, enough to maintain fitness so he could work and save enough money where he could go to Chula Vista for training and then to Princeton and support himself for a year."

Miller worked while rowing at Potomac Boat Club in Washington DC to gain technical skill, develop his physical capabilities, and gain recognition. He won a National Selection Regatta in a double and competed in a World Cup in a quad the year before accepting an invitation into the national team training system.

The problem is, Biller said, for athletes not as organized as Miller there is the lack of a centralized or coordinated development system.

"So, what happens is you have those athletes who are a home run and go right from the varsity eight in a top program to the national team system and are swinging with the big boys. Or you don't.

"You have to develop a system for them. And that's high-performance stuff, it doesn't come from the coaches."

Frank Biller on the ACRA awards dock

Oversight and Coordination

There are clubs that encourage athlete development and provide race opportunities. Some of the most productive in recent years include California Rowing Club (CRC), Vermont-based Craftsbury, Boston's Community Rowing, Inc., the Boston Rowing Federation, Potomac, Philadelphia's Vesper Boat Club and Penn AC to name a few.

But non-collegiate club programs vie for talent and have crews diluted by geographic location or unclear club goals.

CRC head coach Bernhard Stomporowski oversees a program that has served as a training stop for several athletes on the way to the national team system. CRC, like Craftsbury and Potomac, has also produced international sculling crews over the last four years, including entries in the double (Potomac) and quad (Craftsbury) at the 2016 Final Olympic Qualification Regatta.

He believes the efforts of clubs like CRC and others would have better results if there were supervised coordination and direction.

"We could do better if there would be more guidance from USRowing, people who are involved in high performance," he said. "If they would encourage the rowers not to think about being a national team member right away, but using the club programs to learn how to train for a national team."

Clubs, Stomporowski said, "could have a bigger impact, if not for the club politics which destroys opportunities for the rowers. In this case, I'm talking about the sculling programs. We know that the quad will never make it out of a single club, they have to work together."

Expand the Training Center System?

The sentiment is widely held and has certainly been attempted numerous times over several decades, but historically has not always worked out well as athletes, coaches, and clubs have somewhat naturally struggled to overcome self-interest and self-preservation when trying to combine forces. Whether located across the country or even on the same river, combining clubs has often been a fraught enterprise.

Another answer frequently discussed would be to pull a larger group into the training center system, and provide the resources to make it a successful development situation.

"That would be one solution, and that is part of what Teti did" said Biller. "He took a huge group and developed them. But that would require a little bit more coaching resources. You can't just have these guys beat each other up on ergs and in seat racing. You have to actually develop them.

"Some of them come out of college and they need functional training to enable them to take good strokes rather than continuing to allow them to take bad strokes and just get stronger. By taking bad strokes, they are not going to get faster.

"We don't have that development track and I think a lot of that does not necessarily have to do with the coaches; that's high-performance director stuff," he said.

Retention and Culture

A larger issue facing the U.S. men's rowing system is an ability to keep an athlete in the system, even after identification, and maintain a veteran culture that fosters development and competition.

Ask Volpenhein, a current U.S. men's coach, what he feels was the difference for him coming up through the U.S. system and rising to the top of the Olympic podium, and he will point to the culture of the team environment.

"It's interesting, and we talk about this a lot," Volpenhein said. "I came up in an era when there were a lot more older athletes still rowing. All those guys that ended up winning in Athens, most of them were sort of like me; half were walk-ons and had never heard about rowing before and decided to do it. Some were from a state school, or maybe they rowed in high school. Except for a couple of them, we all had similar backgrounds.

"But what we learned from the older guys was how to be a competitive adult in that environment. I was terrified of the older guys that were there when I came up.

"They were like men," he said. "They were huge, really strong, scary men. If you said something wrong, you didn't know if you were going to get punched, or you were going to get a pat on the back. So, you were always on your toes. There was a tension there that worked."

The Financial Challenges of Elite Rowing

The idea of hanging in for another cycle, training extensively while earning next to nothing, putting off the start of careers and family, and risking not finding satisfaction in the end, has proved detrimental to keeping a stable of veteran athletes around for multiple cycles.

The fact of elite training is that athletes must train two or three times a day, live away from home, and often spend part of each winter at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, CA, all while unable to start a career or family, or even earn enough to live comfortably.

Unless the U.S. government decides it wants to fund its Olympic athletes across the board, there will not be sufficient revenue any time soon to pay a senior team athlete anywhere close to a comfortable living wage.

What can happen – and has happened before – is the creation of an environment tailored in ways that allow athletes to find jobs and possibly work on career development.

"We had a training environment where you could have a job and keep training," Volpenhein said of his time as an athlete. "We all had jobs; not necessarily career jobs, but jobs. And that's what we are trying to do now, create an environment where you can have a job."

Moving On

In talking about his decision to finish his rowing career, Miller said it was just time.

"You make huge sacrifices to be on the national team, both financially and personally," he said. "I got married in 2015 in the fall, and I'm in business school now. As soon as I get out, I'm looking to start a family and settle down, and not travel overseas a few times a summer and spend three months in Chula Vista and not making money. I also don't intend to be known as the rower. So, I'm moving on to other things," he said.

"I did the best I could, and Tokyo might have a better outcome, but not a better opportunity. For me."