COLLEGE CREW SCHOLARSHIPS
Women’s Rowing Scholarships. Article by Amy Wilson of the Orange County Register
THE TRUTH ABOUT CREW
TRENDS: Colleges have discovered that women can row, and boy, are they happy about putting big teams on the water.
Early in June, up at Lake Natomas, with hardly anybody watching, women took a leap.
That’s when the first-ever National College Athletic Association women’s crew championships crowned the University of Washington the queens of all they surveyed. And athletic directors across the land heaved a big sigh of relief.
Not because they like the University of Washington, but because this sport — this business of women laying their hands on oars and rowing — is saving their collective butts.
How exactly does that work? Well, the truth about women’s rowing is that it’s a sport that requires fielding a large team, which in turn means it can command up to 20 athletic scholarships, the most the NCAA sanctions for any women’s sport.
And those 20 scholarships are going a long way to solve a big problem. Namely, 25 years ago, Title IX stipulated that schools had to offer to women what they offered to men. That is, just as many athletic scholarships. Sounds uncomplicated until you realize that 85 scholarships go to men to play football. And there is no equivalent sport for women.
A little late, here comes rowing to the rescue.
Team size: big — like 40 to 100 athletes. Equipment: lasts forever. Injuries: few. Doctor bills: tiny. Field: nature provides.
See why athletic directors are having a party?
Says U.S. Rowing’s Sarah Taylor: “This is the only way to gain athletes fast. The sheer numbers make rowing so attractive in the collegiate realm.”
A reasonable parent might wonder what this means to their tall, highly motivated, basketball-challenged daughter.
Wonder no more. It means she can be an NCAA champion and save you money at the same time.
Girls racing toward rowing are only outrun by the universities trying to nab them. Last year, there were 74 college teams, with 2,589 women rowing for their schools. This year, nine more schools are in on the action. So are 1,000 more women.
Next year, the number of teams could reach 110.
“I never felt that camaraderie before. I never thought I’d be this physically or mentally strong. To be in the boat, working for a common goal, it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”
Amy Quigley played soccer for 16 years in Placentia. The El Dorado High School grad had, like 75 percent of the women who row in college, never touched an oar before rowing found her. She can explain the growth in the sport, at least from the athlete’s point of view.
Women, of course, rowed before scholarships made them do it. (Traditionally, some of the biggest rowing powerhouses are Ivy League schools that never have offered athletic scholarships.)
But the scholarships are responsible for getting the sport some attention.
And the attention is drawing more and better athletes.
George Jenkins, USC women’s coach, says that he’s seeing a real increase in the quality of his recruits. And he has only one full scholarship to offer right now.
“I don’t think scholarships drive the squad size,” Washington State Coach Tammy Crawford says. “The squad has always been big. What the scholarships do is bring consistency and a knowledgeable coaching staff, a budget that allowed competitive travel, good training and academic support.
Christy Shaver is a big-deal rowing recruit. “I had no clue this could pay for college.”
Shaver rowed for the University of California, Irvine, then for Orange Coast College. In national rankings, she is somewhere around 25th, though she adds that not every rower takes the test. She was recruited by Virginia, Washington, University of Southern California. She just signed a letter of intent at California State University, Sacramento.
At 5-foot-10, Shaver is on the short side for the sport, she says, but she’s been invited to an Olympic training camp.
Why, 25 years after Title IX became law, are waves being made? The law, it seems, was a great one for benefit of the doubt. A little in need of assertiveness training, the law all those years ago called only for a trend toward equity.
A quarter of a century later, women got tired of waiting for the trend to become fact.
So the NCAA did something to help. It designated rowing as an “emerging” sport for women. That is, the association told the schools that if they wanted to sponsor certain sports, the NCAA would count those sports toward the school’s accreditation.
So schools such as the University of Michigan did what they had to do. Both men and women at the school already were rowing in what amounted to a club program. The university formally adopted the women, built them a facility and a racecourse, bought them new equipment and made obsolete the T-shirt and bake sales they’d used to fund their competitive hobby.
The men, unrecognized, got the hand-me-down boats. But the women are generous; they pay to trailer everything. The men still hold bake sales, and everybody shares the river.
But recruiting for both teams remains a bit haphazard. Right now, more than half of the athletes who row competitively in college are recruited in the fall as they walk through the campus. Some coach or some upper-classman looks over the student’s tall, athletic frame and asks if they’d like to try out. (At Michigan, 180 women tried out that way this year.) It’s the same thing all over, with the same process working at Orange Coast College, USC, even the national champion University of Washington.
Though that, too, could be changing. Junior programs, like the one at Newport Aquatic, are triple the size they were just three years ago. College recruiters now send director Steve Morris literature to pass out to promising rowers.
Costa Mesa’s Brooke Leyerly first rowed at Newport, prompted by a friend whose father rowed. She’d played soccer, run track, did the softball thing. And waited for the scholarship to come.
Today, she’s at Washington State University, on scholarship. To row.
(Coming soon — but not real soon — to a female athlete near you: scholarships in other “emerging” NCAA sports such as ice hockey, synchronized swimming, team handball, water polo, archery, badminton, bowling and squash.)
The only real downside to the truth about crewing is that nobody ever wanted Title IX to kill men’s programs, or even bypass them. That has happened. At UCLA, in 1991, men’s crew died along with men’s water polo. In 1994, men’s swimming and men’s gymnastics bit the bullet, to make way for gender equity in scholarships. (By the way, water polo got reinstated because the men got alumni funding.)
Athletes such as Shaver hate that men are losing out.
“You see these guys working as hard as we are. They deserve the opportunities.”
Sounds eerily familiar.
Early in June, up at Lake Natomas, with hardly anybody watching, women took a leap.
They had some help.
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