John U. Bacon

Teresa Bloodman’s son was thrilled to pass the first two tryouts for his Maumelle, Arkansas, high school freshman basketball team, which allowed him to play on the team for the first two months of the fall. But, when the football season ended, the coach held a third round of tryouts so the football players could come out for the team, and he cut Bloodman’s son.

Teresa Bloodman was so livid she sued the school, the district and the state. She claimed cutting her son was arbitrary, that the lack of a formal appeals process was a violation of due process, and that her son has a constitutional right to participate in school sports.

I can appreciate a mother’s pain seeing her son suffer a setback. And certainly, coaches make plenty of arbitrary decisions, even unfair ones. But if Bloodman wins this case, the rest of us will lose – especially her son.

Her lawyer wants the coach to use a quantitative evaluation system for tryouts – rating each candidate’s skill in dribbling, passing, and shooting, for example – to make the process more objective.

But only an idiot would pick a team on stats alone.

In 1980, U.S. Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks decided the key to beat the all-powerful Soviet team was speed, not scoring. And that’s why he cut two-time All-American Ralph Cox, one of the nation’s leading scorers that year, for players with fewer goals but more speed. Brooks’s team won the gold medal. Guess he picked the right guys.

Any coach with a heart will tell you tryouts are the worst day of the season. When I coached the Huron High School hockey team, “cut-day” inevitably ended with a lot of long, private conversations and plenty of Kleenex, but almost all the players and parents handled it extremely well. One mom, however, I will probably never forget.

Before I became head coach, her son had been accused of stealing money from the locker room as a freshman. Unsolicited, he told me he didn’t do it, and I believed him – and even if he had, any ninth-grader surely deserves a second chance.

After my first team finished the season, we let him join our spring team, which was normally reserved for guys who’d already played on the varsity, and our summer team, and our fall team. He asked us to move him from defense, to offense, then back to defense – and we did. But he didn’t play very well at either position, and did no better in our tryouts. With dozens of good players trying out for the team, I felt I had no choice but to cut him – and many others.

It wasn’t fun. I had grown to like him quite a bit, and admired his attitude.

But I thought that was that, until I received a long letter from his mother. She misquoted something I had said to the players in August, when we were running outside. “I can tell even now what kind of team we’re going to have,” I said, praising their dedication and hard work. She wasn’t there, but claimed I’d said, “I can tell right now who’s going to be on the team.”

Not quite the same things – the latter being something only the dumbest coach in the country would ever say.

She added this kicker about her son being cut: “Others have committed suicide for less.”

Wisely, I did not respond then. But I will now. First, some advice:

• Don’t automatically assume your child is telling you the whole truth.
• If your kids have a problem with their teacher or their coach or their choir director, let your kids approach them first. If they don’t learn how, now, who’s going to approach their professor, or their boss?
• If you must write, wait at least 24 hours. And don’t write anything you wouldn’t say to their face. Email gives false courage to cowards.
• Even better, don’t write anything at all, or else you’ll deny your child a vital lesson: Life is tough, and not always fair. But you have to keep going anyway.

In eighth grade, I had had a great spring hockey league, scoring five times more than the other center. But that fall, he made the travel team, and I didn’t. I was crushed. But my parents did something wonderful: Nothing. The next year, I realized a lifelong dream when I made the high school varsity.

A few years later, when some colleges rejected me, I could handle it. When I started out as a writer, and received literally hundreds of rejection letters from magazines, I could handle that, too. And if I couldn’t, you would not be reading this right now.

And I would not have the chance, in print, to thank my parents, for not fighting my battles for me, and giving me the great gift of growing up.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” He also co-authored “A Legacy of Champions,” and provided commentary for “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game,” which has been airing on various stations in Michigan and nationally.

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John U. Bacon

I went to Ann Arbor Huron High School, considered by every objective source to be the greatest high school in the history of the universe. And one of the things that made it so great when I was there was an intramural softball league.

Maybe your clearly inferior high school had one, too. But the IM softball league at Huron was created and run entirely by students – the burnouts, no less. That meant the adults, perhaps wisely, wanted nothing to do with it.

So the burnouts got the park permits – God bless ‘em – and every clique had a team, from the guys in auto shop to marching band. They gave their teams names like the Extra Burly Studs, the Master Batters and – yes – the ‘Nads. If you pause to think of their cheer, you’ll get the joke.

My buddies and I failed to get a team together our junior year, but our senior year, we found inspiration. Most of my friends weren’t playing spring sports, so we came home every day after school to catch “Leave It To Beaver” re-runs on Channel 20 – on something called UHF. (Kids, go ask Grandpa.)

Come softball season, we were moved to build a team around that very name: The Cleavers. But if we were going to face battle-tested squads like the All-Star Rogues and the Ghetto Tigers, we knew we’d need an edgier name. And that’s when we came up with – yes – the Almighty Cleavers. You know, to instill fear in our opponents.

You can imagine how well that worked.

Our next stroke of genius was our uniform: we each got one of our dads’ undershirts, then used a laundry marker to write one of the characters’ names on the back: Ward, Wally, Eddie – we had ‘em all. Now all we needed were 10 more players.

No problem. Once word got out about our hardcore name and unis, people flocked to our team, even a half-dozen women. None of the other teams were co-ed, but there was no rule against it – because there were almost no rules. That’s what you get when you play in a league founded by burnouts.

We didn’t just expect to lose. We were built to lose. But we didn’t care. In fact, that was our team motto: “We Don’t Care.” Whenever somebody was seen running too hard or – god forbid – sliding into home plate, we started our chant: “We Don’t Care! We Don’t Care!”

The girls could play wherever they wanted, and nobody was allowed to yell at anyone, no matter how badly they screwed up.

It probably helped that, like most teams, we brought cooling beverages to each game, be they “jumbos” of Goebel’s, “torpedoes” of Colt 45 or, for big games, an actual quarter barrel of Stroh’s Bohemian Style. We’d set it up right at the corner of Huron Parkway and Fuller, with Lord knows how many teachers, parents and police officers driving by. No one cared.

Yes, I know we were being stupid and illegal, but you have to remember this was at a time when Huron had a smoking lounge for students, Ann Arbor had a five-dollar pot law, and the Almighty Cleavers were probably on the conservative side of things. Okay, on a very relative scale. And all of it might explain why I can’t recall a single fight among the 12 tribes that played. (Take that any way you want.)

But what I saw next defied explanation: Against a bunch of guys who clearly wanted to beat us, our co-ed squad won the game. And then, another. And another.

It was incredible. Once the girls realized they weren’t going to get yelled at, their Inner Softball Players came out – and before we knew it, we finished the regular season at 9-2, in second place.

Well, our magical season had to come to an end, and it did – with a playoff loss to the always-tough Junior Junkies. Even more heartbreaking, actor Hugh Beaumont, who played Ward Cleaver, died the week before, prompting all of us to draw black armbands on our sacred jerseys.

But then, something even stranger happened. The mother of one of our founders happened to be the president of the American Psychiatric Association, so reporters were always calling her up to get her expert opinion on this or that. When an Associated Press reporter asked her about violence on television, she finally said, “Well, it can’t be that bad. My son watches ‘Leave It to Beaver’ every day with his buddies.’”

It just so happened the reporter was a big “Leave It to Beaver” fan, and voila! All of a sudden our team was on the AP wire, in the Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press and featured in TV Guide, for crying out loud.

My grandparents, in from Eastern Canada, must have been completely confused – or simply assumed all American teenagers appear in national stories for playing IM softball as a rite of passage before graduating. But the unexpected attention wasn’t the point.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had more fun playing anything than I did playing intramural softball that spring. No parents, no umpires, no rules except most runs win – and win or lose, get over it. “No One Cares!”

It was low-rent, small stakes, and big, big fun – because it was ours.

I don’t think kids today have any idea what that feels like.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the Wall Street Journal, and ESPN Magazine, among others. He is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller, and “Third and Long: Three Years with Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines,” due out this fall through FSG. Bacon teaches at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009.

John U. Bacon

Fennville, Michigan – On Monday, I drove across Michigan to see a Class C regional semi-final basketball game, pitting tiny Schoolcraft High School against even tinier Fennville.

Both schools were undefeated – but that’s not why I was going. I was going to see the impact of a young man who would not be there.

Before I drove back, I also learned how quickly even a record-breaking basketball game can become utterly insignificant – and then, just a few days later, how the next game can matter so much.

Fennville is about 200 miles from Detroit, but it might as well be 200 light years. When you approach Fennville, you pass a sign declaring, “Hometown of Richard ‘Richie’ Jordan, Member of the 2001 National High School Sports Hall of Fame.”

You haven’t heard of Richie Jordan, who graduated almost 50 years ago and stands only 5-7. But everyone around here has, and down at the Blue Goose Café, they still talk about all the records he set in football, basketball and baseball. But the last few years, they’ve been talking about Wes Leonard.

When Gary Leonard joined his brother’s company in Holland, near Lake Michigan, the family could have moved to any number of nearby towns, but chose little Fennville, which has just 1,500-some people, a third of them high school students. Here, the whole town comes out for football and basketball games – and musicals and graduations, too.

“I left Fennville for another place,” English teacher Melissa Hoover recalled in the teachers’ lounge, “and I kept saying, ‘In Fennville they do this,’ and ‘In Fennville they do that.’ Finally, one of the teachers said, ‘Well, maybe you should go back to Fennville.’ She was right. So I did.”

The Leonards loved Fennville, and Fennville loved them back.

Their oldest son, Wes, often asked his teachers about their weekends, partly to avoid work but also because he was simply curious about people – all people.

Leonard would invite the special-ed kids to join him for lunch, and soon the other jocks were doing it, too. When English teacher Susan McEntyre read her students’ journals last semester, “Just about all the kids wrote that Wes was their best friend. They always wrote about that.”

No matter what you were like in high school, you’d want Wes Leonard to be your friend. And he would be.

As an athlete, Leonard was the best thing to come out of Fennville since Richie Jordan himself – something people around here don’t say lightly. Leonard was the team’s star quarterback – he threw seven touchdowns in one game this past fall – but it was on the basketball court where the junior center really connected with the fans. Sitting so close, they could feel his energy and drive and passion – and see his trademark grin.

But even with Leonard leading the team, no one dared to imagine they’d enter their last regular season game with a perfect 19-0 mark.

When the Bridgman Bees jumped out to an 11-point half-time lead, Leonard took over, pushing the game to overtime. Then, with about 30 seconds left, he drove the lane for a pretty lay-up – and the win. Fennville’s fans rushed the court, and hoisted their hero onto their shoulders.

It was the kind of ending that sends announcers into paroxysms of hyperbole: Incredible! Unbelievable! Unthinkable!

Then, just seconds later, the truly unthinkable actually happened: Wes Leonard’s enlarged heart gave out, and he collapsed, right on the court.

His father ran down to him, yelling, “Breathe, Wes, breathe! Don’t die on me!” The paramedics loaded Leonard into an ambulance, where they worked to get his heart pumping again. Gary and Jocelyn could only look through the back window, helpless.

Before midnight, the town pastor emerged from the hospital to tell the crowd Wes Leonard had died.

When a small town hero fulfills his fans’ every dream, they put up signs about him on the city limits. What happens to that town when its hero falls right in front of them?

The next day the grade school kids clutched teddy bears, and cried in the corner. Wes’s classmates hugged and sobbed in the hallways. The older townspeople gathered at the Blue Goose, talking about him softly, with tears in their eyes.

“If I was twice as good as everyone else, I’d be arrogant,” said Mike Peel, 57, a real estate agent in nearby Douglas. “But he never was. Never even argued bad calls. He was the kind of kid who could hug his mom in front of a thousand people and not feel embarrassed about it.”

Letters and posters came from as far away as the Philippines and Cambodia. The NBA’s Golden State Warriors asked what they could do to help, Michigan State basketball coach Tom Izzo cut practice short to drive to Fennville to talk to the family and the team, and Bo Kimble, whose Loyola Marymount teammate Hank Gathers died on the court from the same condition in 1990, drove all night from Philadelphia to be with them for four days, arriving as a famous stranger and leaving as a close friend. The Blackhawks’ arch-rivals in Saugatuck hosted the luncheon after the funeral.

The coach had to ask his players if they wanted to play their first-round playoff game that Monday. They thought about it. They discussed it. Then they decided, Yes. This is what we do.

They moved the games to Hope College, where the Blackhawks drew over 3,000 fans each night. When the other teams playing that day took the court, they were all wearing the same black T-shirts that Fennville wore, with Leonard’s name and number on the back, and “NEVER FORGOTTEN” on the front.

They struggled in their first game, caught fire in their second, then came back in the district finals Friday night from nine points down to win by three. “If you weren’t there,” Mike Peel said, “you wouldn’t believe it.”

This Monday, when Fennville faced Schoolcraft, the Blackhawks finally ran out of gas and luck in the second half and lost, 86-62. But if you didn’t see the scoreboard, you’d have no idea Fennville was getting trounced. The players kept working just as hard, and the crowd kept cheering just as loud, to the very last second.

Harder days are ahead. They know that.

They also know people like Wes Leonard come along in a place like Fennville every 50 years or so, and they might not see another like him the rest of their lives. But the very qualities Wes Leonard brought out in them – pride, unity, and joy – are the very traits they’ll rely on to get them through.

The people of Fennville will never be the same.

But they will be okay.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the Wall Street Journal, and ESPN Magazine, among others. He is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller, and “Third and Long: Three Years with Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines,” due out this fall through FSG. Bacon teaches at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009.

John U. Bacon

Michigan towns invest a lot in their high schools – and they should, because those schools represent them. That’s why you see those signs at the city limits boasting about their Class B state baseball champs or Class D volleyball team – from 1994. I’ve always thought that’s pretty cool – and even cooler for the state champs who get to see it every time they come home.

A town’s pride often carries over to the team’s mascots, like the Midland Chemics, the Calumet Copper Kings, or the Bad Axe Hatchets – great names, every one of them. When you pull those jerseys over your head, you know you’re wearing a piece of your home, your history, your very identity.

But if you play for the Panthers or the Wildcats or – heaven forbid – the Eagles, you’re one of a hundred. Actually, you’re one of 103. That’s how many high schools have those names in Michigan alone.

Ann Arbor’s newest high school is among the unfortunate.

Instead of letting the students pick their mascot, a committee of 50 did it for them. And really, a committee of 50 isn’t a committee. It’s a small village. The committee did what committees do: it picked the lamest possible names.

They called the new high school Skyline, which makes no sense at all, because Ann Arbor doesn’t have a skyline – and if it did, it wouldn’t be in the northwest corner of town, where the school is. No, in that neighborhood, you have a treeline. See the difference? The committee couldn’t.

But the mascot the committee picked is worse. After careful study and lots of discussion, they came up with – yes! – the Eagles! Just like 44 other schools in the state, Michigan’s most common nickname. Awesome.

Which is why I feel grateful to wake up every morning and know that I am … a River Rat!

Yeah, you heard me right. The mascot for my alma mater, Ann Arbor Huron, is the River Rats. And yes, there’s a story behind that.

For well over a century, Ann Arbor had only one high school, whose teams were called the Pioneers. So, when they opened Ann Arbor’s second high school in 1969, Ann Arbor’s first school decided to call themselves the Pioneer … Pioneers! Hey, it rhymes. Get it? And only three teams in our hockey league are called that!

The question was, what to call the new school? They were building it hard by the Huron River, so that was easy: Huron High. Nice.

Now, what about the mascot? Years before Huron was even finished, Pioneer students started calling their new rivals the “sewer rats.” This being the sixties, and this being Ann Arbor, the Huron students weren’t offended, but flattered, converting the name to the River Rats, and claiming it as their own.

The administrators hoped the students would pick the Highlanders or the Hawks, but the counter-culture crowd voted for “River Rats” in a landslide. So the administrators decided to start the school without an official mascot.

The name finally caught on for good during football camp a few years later. Huron was so overcrowded in its early years, the joke went, that even the rats left the building. So when the football players sat down to eat, and a huge, hairy rat ambled into the cafeteria, the football players didn’t need a committee to start their spontaneous chant: “The rat is back! The rat is back!”

So what if the principal later found that rat under Huron’s trademark arch – and clubbed it to death with a two-by-four? Those players, inspired by that rat, beat Pioneer for the first time in 1976, and the name stuck.

Yes, other schools might make fun of us – as I’m sure they do the Hematites, the Flivvers, and the Nimrods, all great names – but they know who we are, because we’re the only River Rats around. And because we have a story, we know who we are, too.

Poor Eagles. Poor Pioneers.

Go Rats!

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the New York Times, and ESPN Magazine, among others. His most recent book is “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller. Bacon teaches at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism; and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.

Alec Washabaugh helps carry the boat as Meaghan Kennedy directs traffic. Both are students at Pioneer High School. Next fall, Kennedy will be heading to Indiana University in Bloomington, where she’ll attend school on a crew scholarship. (Photos by the writer.)

From behind me comes the warning from one of the coxswains: “Heads up!” Coxswains steer the boats on the water – and on land as well, because lifting and turning the long craft requires coordination.

A peek over my shoulder confirms that the command is directed at me – I’m standing near the middle of an upside-down 8-person rowing shell held aloft by eight women. My noggin is safe for a few seconds as they pause. To clear the boat completely, I’d need to hustle a good 25 feet in one direction or the other. But that seems like an overly dramatic and panicky move. Surely that’s not what boathouse culture demands? Instead, I simply kneel. The boat makes its way over me and down to the dock.

The learning curve is steep. A few minutes later: “Heads up!” The scene repeats itself.

I confirm with Pioneer senior Meaghan Kennedy, who’s standing nearby, that yes, maybe I should find another vantage point. Kennedy is coxswain for the men’s varsity eight-man boat and one of the team’s captains, along with twins Zach and Mackenzie Miller. Kennedy is waiting to guide her own boat down to the dock.

Who Pays for This?

The Chronicle’s report of the March 24, 2010 meeting of the Ann Arbor Public Schools board of trustees includes details on this year’s proposed budget, which features a new “pay-to-play” program for athletics [emphasis added]:

[Superintendent Todd] Roberts emphasized that it was a goal for extracurricular activities not to prevent any student from participating. The cost to participate in high school sports would be $150 for the first sport, and $50 for every sport thereafter. In middle school, there would simply be one $50 athletic fee for any number of sports played over one year. Scholarships would be available, he said, for athletics, as well as to cover the musical instrument fees.

Up to now, the fee assessed by the district has been $35 to cover insurance for sports sanctioned by the Michigan High School Athletic Association. Rowing is not a sanctioned sport.

Coaches Griffith at Pioneer High School and Kraft at Huron High say the pay-to-play system will have an impact on their programs. Griffith told The Chronicle his rowers already pay $580 a year. For a fall and spring seasons rower, the proposed system would mean $200 more, pushing the total to $780. Griffith says that could give some of his 73 rowers this year pause. And if fewer students come out for the sport, that will nudge the cost higher still – the $580 cost is calculated by taking the budget set by the nonprofit Pioneer Rowing Club and dividing by the number of rowers.

Not a financial bailout. Huron High rowing coach Tom Kraft empties some water out of the launch from the previous day’s rain.

Kraft has similar concerns. The Huron Rowing Association is the nonprofit that oversees the capital investment and operations for the Huron High School team. Cost per rower per season is $275, which comes to$550 for a full year. Kraft notes that some scholarship money is available. One obligation that scholarships don’t cover, says Kraft, is the 400 points worth of fundraising effort each rower needs to contribute. There’s a point system for volunteering with various fundraisers – a deficit in points gets paid at a 1 point = 1 dollar conversion.

The school system supports the rowing program with funds for coaches and travel.

The rowers are not alone in already paying something to support their participation in athletics. All 38 varsity sports at each of the two high schools have associated booster clubs. The check that Pioneer golfers write to the booster club, for example, is $200. But in a phone interview, Liz Margolis, spokeswoman for Ann Arbor Public Schools, stressed that no student can be prevented from participating in a sport due to failure to pay a booster club fee. The same will be true of the pay-to-play system, Margolis said.

Out on the Water with Pioneer Crew: “A Fool Maid of Honor”

From the dock downstream, to the south, it’s about 500 meters to Argo Dam. Once the two racing shells – one 8-man and the other a 4-man – have made their way to the dam end of the pond, Coach Griffith checks in with them from our launch. Before we’d left shore he had searched the boat house for one of the bullhorns, but found only a megaphone – just a cone with no electronic amplification. He tests it out: “Is this at all a viable means of communication?” The indication from the rowers is, no, not really. But they make do.

Out on the water from foreground to background: Meaghan Kennedy, Zach Miller, Drew McMillan, Lucas Kennedy, Konstantinos Papefthymiou, Liad Lehavy, Nick Terrell.

Griffith starts them off with a two-pause drill. He wants them to interject “hiccup pauses” to make sure they get good “send” to the boat. The coxswains – Meaghan Kennedy for the 8-man and Zack Ackerman in the 4-man – are to call out the pauses to the crew.

We make our way back upstream well past the dock. Griffith admonishes the rowers, to “roll up together” better. We encounter some other rowing shells, and a kayaker who’s out on the pond that day, so Griffith hangs back with his motor launch. He doesn’t want to subject them to the wake from our boat.

We stop short of the US-23 bridge and turn around. The assigned drill – back up towards the dam – involves increasing the stroke rate every 20 strokes for 10 strokes at a time. This cadence is monitored by the coxswains, who are fed data from a rowing computer. The rowing computer works on the same principle as modern bicycling computers that count wheel rotations with a magnet.

Pioneer men’s team, foreground to background: Henry MacConnel, Josh LaHaye, David Chapman, Chris Darnton, Zack Ackerman (coxswain, hand only – look for the purple swatch at the edge of the frame).

In the racing shell, a magnet under the seat of the first rower – the stroke seat – tickles a sensor each time it slides past. The computer automatically calculates the stroke rate based on elapsed time.

Griffith has the boats practice their starts. “Sit ready! Attention! Row!” is the command sequence. He focuses his rowers on body angle – they’re laying back too far at the end of the stroke during the starts. With high stroke cadences, he tells them, they can cut off the lay back – there’s no need to go past vertical.

I switch out of Griffith’s boat and climb aboard a launch with women’s coach Suzanne Buzzell. “Buzz” did her collegiate rowing at Michigan State University. She’s putting an 8-woman boat through its paces. They’re working on building up to a stroke rate of 32 per minute. Buzz is focusing them on their “catches” – the part of the stroke when the oar blade first enters the water: “Keep the catches light! Let the blade fall right in! Effortless catches!”

Pioneer women’s team: Sarah Foster (coxswain), Hannah Graham, Annika Gage, Anna DeBoer, Claire Barrett, Rachel Bielajew, Ella Janowitz, Annie Oldani, Kendall Phillips.

And then, “Fool maid of honor!” Surely this was the distortion from the bullhorn? Or the way sound travels across the open water? [Unlike Griffith, Buzz had managed to snag an electronic bullhorn from the boat house.] A few more repetitions allow the actual words to settle acoustically in my ear: “Full blade of water.” Ah. That makes somewhat more sense.

At the end of the stroke, Buzz wants the blades coming out squared and clean: “Don’t throw up that water!” Although Buzz is focused on giving technical feedback, she explains to me that underlying the technical work is an aerobic- and stamina-building drill.

Well past the US-23 and railroad bridges not far from Barton Dam, we turn around. The kayaker, who’s been following at a distance, approaches and asks if he’s bugging us. No, he’s fine, says Buzz. She asks if he’s trying to race them. He confirms that he is. He’s fine just as long as he doesn’t run into them, Buzz advises.

The women in the boat want to hear from Buzz how they’re doing. Asks one, “Are my shoulders staying down?” Buzz’s frank assessment: “Yes – when I yell at you!” Another wants to know, “Is my handle height at the catch getting better?” Again, Buzz doesn’t tell give her the unconditional praise she’s probably hoping to hear: “When I yell at you – yes.”

Sarah Foster calls out the stroke count.

The practice for this boat wraps up with some start drills. The idea is to start with a five-stroke sequence with increasing power: half, half, three-quarter, full, full. That five-stroke sequence segues into 5 full strokes.

They’re trying to get the stroke rate up as high as possible. After several start drills, Buzz asks coxswain Sarah Foster for a report. They’ve been hitting between 31 and 32 strokes per minute with a high of 33.

Buzz tells them for the final drill she’d like to see a 36: “That’s doable,” she assures them. As they set off in search of a 36, Buzz exhorts them: “See how high you can get it. Have fun with this, ladies! Send it!”

The report back from Foster: 35 and a half. Asks Buzz, “Seriously?” Yep. Buzz tells them to stroke it into the dock. The 36 will apparently be left for another day.

But no.

Annika Gage, rowing in the second seat, wants to take another shot at 36. Buzz obliges, giving them 15 strokes after the initial five, to get to 36 strokes per minute. “Sit ready! Attention! Row!” And 20 strokes later Foster announces their victory for the afternoon: “36 and a half!”

Out on the Water with Huron Crew

It’s a week later now. Huron High coach Tom Kraft and I are waiting outside the boat house as assistants Ted Deakin, Jerry Hoffman and Mike Dove tell the team how practice will work that day. Kraft tells me that Dove should be credited with getting the Huron rowing program started. After helping with Pioneer for a few years, he’s now back at Huron.

Huron High rowers Peter Dolce (left)  and Matt Goolsby (right) before they were asked to “sit ready.”

The workout will be an experiment, says Kraft, combining the novice (first-year) rowers with varsity. Four novice rowers and four varsity rowers will sit in each boat. It’s a way for novice rowers to learn more quickly, Kraft says.

As we head out on the water, it’s windy – windy to the point that Kraft notes that the coxswains will need to be extra mindful, given the less experienced rowers in the boats. He also tells the oarsmen to be focused on the commands they hear from the coxswains: “If they ask you to row, you row, don’t make the coxies ask twice.”

After collecting the boats – three 8-man racing shells  and two coaches launches – near the dam end of Argo, the warm up starts heading north. They start with six people rowing, the other two just “setting” the boat – that is, balancing it. As they make their way up the pond, one of the three boats is clearly zipping along faster than the others. “Somehow that boat got loaded up with strong guys,” comments Kraft.

Kraft gives pointers: “Make sure it’s the outside hand doing the work!” “Get your hands out in front of your knees, sit up tall.”

After warming up, their first workout piece is seven minutes long with increasing stroke rates. In terms of stroke rate, here’s what it looks like:

1 minute  at 24 spm
2 minutes at 26 spm
3 minutes at 28 spm
1 minute  at 30 spm

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Huron High School oar blade, just before the catch. In the center of the frame is Drew Baxter. Matt Schulte, sitting behind Baxter, is setting the boat during this warm-up phase.

With varsity-level rowers in every seat, Kraft said, they’d do 36-38 strokes per minute for an entire piece. For novices, 32 strokes might be all they could handle.

After the piece is done, Mike Dove gets them started on their second piece – it will be a five-stroke start.  “All boats sitting ready! Attention! Row!”

Kraft notes that for some of the rowers that is surely only their second-ever racing start. But then he observes, “They got through it. And nobody died!”

Regatta: Hebda Cup

Coming up on the schedule for the Huron and Pioneer rowing teams is the Hebda Cup in Wyandotte on April 24. There are around 20 races scheduled between 8 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. that Saturday. The drive to Wyandotte, from Ann Arbor takes around an hour.