Sync Or Swim WSU Rowers Fight Drudgery Of Remote Training Site To Pursue Success

Their only downtime is spent riding in the back seat of a van.

Five vans, take your pick.

And no matter how the 60-plus Washington State University women rowers decide to arrange themselves, their daily destination remains the same.

There is no road sign welcoming them to remote Wawawai Landing, the team’s training ground 18 miles southwest of Pullman. The majestic site on the Snake River, just above Lower Granite Dam, needs no introduction. These athletes can picture the river’s twists and turns in their sleep. To them, their spectacular outdoor playground has become as ordinary as the inside of Gold’s Gym.

Seventeen hours a week training on the same water will do that.

Most every spring weekday afternoon is devoted to crew practice. Depart campus at 3:30, arrive home around 7 p.m. Pre-race season translates to two-a-days.

Rise and shine. It’s 5 a.m. on the digital, 20 degrees on the dial, and time to paddle.

Unfit weather? Nothing short of “Fargo” or “Twister” qualifies.

“The ride out here is the best part of the day,” Varsity Eight rower Magan Wiggs said from the back seat of a university van. “It’s 25 minutes I can sleep.”

Sleep borders on becoming a luxury. Three mornings a week, the women train in Bohler Gym from 6:30 to 7:30. Twelve-hour days away from home are common.

But the Cougars are not alone. Washington State was a front-runner in women’s crew, declaring it a varsity sport in 1990-91 and offering scholarships since then. Seven years later, the sport is on the up-and-up. Ninety-six NCAA schools are fielding women’s varsity teams this season: 53 in Division I.

This year, women’s rowing is in its first as an NCAA-sanctioned sport. Its first champions will be crowned June 1 on Lake Natoma near Sacramento, Calif. The past national titles - and one which the WSU Junior Varsity Eight with coxswain won in 1995 - were not funded by the NCAA.

“Crew,” Washington State coach Tammy Crawford said, “is becoming women’s football.”

It’s football in the sense of generous financial aid, which is a direct result of Title IX. Women’s crew is allotted 20 scholarships, the most among NCAA women’s sanctioned sports. Crawford said 17.8 currently are granted at WSU, with only one athlete receiving full aid.

“Basically, at the end of the racing season, anyone who ended up in the Varsity Eight, I pretty much put them at the same amount.” Crawford said. “About $7,000 each.”

The only men’s sport with more scholarship money is football.

But while football’s talent pool is stocked with hoards of young men who learned the game on the Pop Warner level, the number of high school female rowers could barely fill a goldfish bowl.

Crawford, a former University of Washington rower and fourth-year WSU head coach, estimates only 5 percent of her team’s members rowed prior to college. Walk-on athletes play major roles in most college programs.

“A friend of mine said, ‘Why don’t you come join the crew team with me?”’ said Varsity Eight rower Molly Jordan, recalling her freshman year. “She quit two months later. I’m here four years later.”

Jordan, a swimmer during her Anchorage, Alaska, high school years, recalled about 70 freshmen signed up. At the end of the year, there were less than 30.

“Eight of us are still left,” she said.

Crawford’s main recruiting venues are high school basketball and volleyball tournaments, always in search of that 5-foot-10, 160-pound prize.

“When we go to the basketball tournaments, I want the kids who are defensive, who are aggressive, ripping down the rebounds, flying out of bounds after that loose ball,” she said.

“I like volleyball, too. But I can’t tell their feistiness. I can see if they have a passion, but I can’t see them move up and down the floor to see if they wimp out.”

Wimps on a crew team? Check your body fat at the dock, please.

“There are some big women, 5-11, 180 pounds. Not only are they physically soft, but they’re kind of marshmallows up here, too,” said Crawford, pointing to her forehead.

The standard spring regatta distance is 2,000 meters (about 1 miles). It’s much like an 800-meter run, something that’s farther than a runner can sprint, but a difficult distance to set a pace.

“A race is 7 minutes of sheer hell,” Crawford said. “You want to puke at the end of it. People do puke at the end of it.”

Practice has its own rigors, beginning with the 45-minute campus-to-coast setup time. The rest of the afternoon is spent either synchronizing techniques or flat-out sprinting. Crawford travels alongside the Varsity and Junior Varsity Eight boats in a powerboat, barking instructions on her megaphone. Novice coach Jodi Winchell and graduate assistants do the same with the four-person and the novice rowers.

Mess up the stroke and Crawford will broadcast the rower’s technical faux pas for all to hear from ship to shore.

In the past, the Cougars’ success rate has been notable, highlighted by the ‘95 JV Eight’s national title. Current varsity rowers Mykel Papke, Nicole Bauer, Jordan and coxswain Ann Hoang rowed on that boat. With many of those same rowers, the Cougars Varsity Eight finished seventh last year.

Expectations were high this year, but six weeks into the season, WSU is just beginning to deliver. Its Varsity Eight’s most rewarding finish was last week at Lake Vancouver, where it beat a tough Oregon State team. But prior to that, the Cougs lost to traditional conference foes Washington, Stanford and Oregon State. They will race again at the Pac-10 championships May 18 on the NCAA championships course near Sacramento.

Sixteen Varsity Eights and Varsity Fours and eight JV Eights will compete in the national championships. Some will be invited by winning their conferences, others will wait for at-large bids.

“Right now, we’re on the low end of the bubble,” Crawford said. “We’ve got some talented, hard workers on this team. But maybe I’ve given then too much credit.

“If I knew what was going on, I’d change it.”

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