Don't Argue With Free Speed - What Scullers Can Learn from Nordic Skiers Part IV

It is winter again in Craftsbury, which means the lake is frozen and we're skiing and erging rather than sculling. The longer I'm here, the more I look forward to ski season as an opportunity both to ski for its own sake but more importantly to ski in order to learn more about sculling, and I am rarely disappointed on that front. Thus far, this year's overwhelming lesson mostly involves a deepening understanding of what skiing has been trying to teach me all along: that more effort does not necessarily equate to more speed. Granted that sculling teaches that lesson, too, I'll offer the potentially controversial opinion that skiing teaches it with greater clarity - if nothing else, it makes the lesson more obvious. I've written on this same topic before (see 3/29/12 post "Motion over Effort") but that's of no great consequence, since we so often fail to learn what is not repeated, and besides, I have two new stories to go with it. A week or so ago, I was skiing behind two other scullers, both of whom have made multiple national teams over the past few years, looking to make their next one. We were on a hill called "Dyno", which is not a particularly daunting climb but is long enough and steep enough to show the inefficiencies of scullers who are still in the comparatively early stages of learning to ski - real skiers either drop us off the back on Dyno or get to the crest a lot less gassed than we do. After we had gotten back on the flat, one of the scullers remarked "You know, it's an interesting thing about skiing - a lot of times when you add effort, you don't get any faster." The other one went a step further and noted "Yeah - sometimes it actually makes you slower." That was the whole conversation, but it got me thinking about whether scullers understand the phenomenon of wasted effort as well as nordic skiers do, and I didn't have to wait long for a possible answer. About a week later, two of our best skiers were running a clinic for the scullers, teaching us simple fundamentals like body position, weight shift, and the timing of steps and pole plants. Small miracles were taking place all over the short stretch of trail we were skiing on, and the GRP scullers were chattering about how much difference it makes to do really simple things like thinking about swinging the arms from the shoulder and elbow rather than from the hand, moving arms and legs rhythmically, and all sorts of other things that ten-year-old skiers do automatically but that hadn't occurred to us to try. In very short order, we were all skiing faster with less effort. Our first reaction, as I've noted above, was amazement and delight, but it was the second reaction that should give scullers everywhere pause: not long after the initial expressions of enthusiasm, several of the scullers started joking about the whole faster-with-less-effort phenomenon. Tell me if you haven't heard something like this on the water or around the boathouse before. Sculler #1: "It feels really easy - that's amazing." Sculler #2:"Yeah - I don't trust it." Sculler #1:"Exactly - good technique is the devil's way of tricking you into thinking that you don't have to work as hard." It was a joke, of course, but we all know that the root of humor is usually a truth about human foibles, like not being able to fully enjoy the simple pleasure of going fast without somehow feeling guilty about it. And that made me marvel at the hold the culture of effort seems to have on scullers and rowers. Too many of us don't trust free speed even as we seek it. As it happens, scullers #1 and #2 in the conversation above have both been on multiple national teams in multiple boat classes. Both of them are known for their willingness to tear themselves in two in order to win races of any kind. They are exactly the kind of oarsmen that everyone wants in the boat with them when the brass ring is on the line. And while it may well be that elite nordic skiers learning to scull might have a similar conversation as they begin discovering simple means of making the boat go fast with less effort, the exchange struck me as being very much a rower's conversation. I admittedly haven't spent nearly as much time around nordic skiing as I have around sculling and rowing. Certainly I have heard nordic skiers talk about skiing hard, just as rowers, scullers, and coaches talk about pulling hard, honking on it, and so forth. Skiers, like scullers and other endurance athletes, are proud of their gut-wrenching, I-passed-out/puked/couldn't-stand-up-after-the-race stories. But I do think, based on many years of observation, that scullers and rowers tend to be very stubborn in their seemingly unshakeable faith in more effort as the bottom-line solution to all problems and less inclined to trust free speed when they find it. I really think that when an elite skier finds himself really flying, he's more inclined to think something more along the lines of "cool!" while most scullers, even at the elite level, are inclined, at least in a back-of-the-mind way, to think something more like "this doesn't feel hard enough - what am I not doing that will make it hurt the way it's supposed to?" It's not the devil's way of tricking you, meathead. It's the rowing gods' way of telling you you're doing it exceptionally well for once. Sometimes more effort can make you faster. Sometimes it makes you slower. Don't argue with free speed when it comes. Embrace it and go faster.

Effeeciency - What Scullers Can Learn from Nordic Skiers Part III

     I have a friend and colleague in coaching who gets incensed when other coaches say that rowing and sculling are "simple sports."  The ease with which this particular coach gets incensed over such seemingly small matters aside, I think he has a point.  One can easily argue that with the incredibly varied skills that athletes must have and the incredibly complex schemes that coaches devise, games like football and basketball are more complicated than rowing and sculling, but that doesn't mean that coaches of rowing and sculling have easier jobs than those of football and basketball coaches.  If anything, the sculler's learning process and his coach's teaching process are more difficult, because the feedback that rowing and sculling provide is so subtle.  Not convinced?  Consider this: a golfer who takes an imperfect stroke for any of a hundred thousand reasons sees immediately that he has done so - his ball not only doesn't go where he intended for it to go, it may careen crazily into the woods, skip dismally into the lake, or dribble harmlessly into the tall grass two hundred or more yards from where it would have been had he executed the shot to the best of his ability.  That's immediate feedback.  A sculler who takes a poor stroke that his coach can see is clumsy to the point of oafish gracelessness still gets to witness his boat moving forward from A to B, and it's an impossibility for the boat to go careening off into the woods as the result of one bad stroke.  You could flip, of course, but the threshold for that is a lot higher than for a mis-hit in golf.  I pointed this out to a roomful of very accomplished rowers one day during a video review session and proposed the idea that if rowing gave us feedback as emphatically as golf does, we'd all be much better at it.  After a short pause, one of the rowers quipped from the back of the room "Yeah, either that or we'd all quit."  And he's probably right, unfortunately. 
     But let's look at Nordic skiing again, as an example of another so-called simple sport that, though it doesn't give feedback as emphatically and obviously as golf, does give it a little more noticeably than rowing and sculling do. 
     As you make progress in Nordic skiing, it is not hard to see when you are losing speed, particularly when making turns or climbing.  The same hill, climbed patiently, goes by more quickly both in a literal, by-the-clock sense and insofar as it takes less out of you both mentally and physically.  Try to hurry and your rhythm falls apart and suddenly you're skiing with less speed and more effort.  The feedback is admittedly much more subtle than it is in golf, but it's a good bit more obvious than it is in sculling.  Swimming is similar.  And if I seem to be making too fine a point here, consider this: we have all seen elegant crews who were by no means lacking in fitness lose to crews that were clearly and obviously clumsy in their movements in the boat.  This sort of thing just doesn't happen in Nordic skiing or swimming - if you ski or swim clumsily, you lose.  In rowing and sculling "Just pull harder," as I've noted before, often does produce victory, and that's the nefarious thing about trying to convince fit, strong people to truly dedicate themselves to technical proficiency and boatmanship.  The obvious question for a meathead to ask is "if I can win just by honking on it harder than you, why do I need to do anything else?"  And that's the great conundrum of our sport.  And the solution is subtle, not simple - and though it's always elusive, it's more likely to find you if you're in a single than an eight.  Learn to pay attention. 

No Stars on a Crew (or "No One Ever Hurts a Crew By Quitting")

"Never say never" tends to be a pretty good aphorism for rowing coaches or anyone else.  Thor Nilsen said Brad Lewis would never be a champion, and at the time he said it, that was probably a pretty good bet in the eyes of most rowers.  1984 shot that statement full of holes.  "You'll never win races if you don't stop lunging at the catch/hesitating at the release/getting too much layback/etc." takes a beating season after season.  Crews with laid-back coaches win races.  So do crews with intense, militaristic, "do-it-my-way-or-get-the-hell-out" coaches.  So there appear to be very few absolutes in the coaching of successful rowers and scullers, but here's one that's pretty damn close: Never allow an athlete to think that s/he's more important than any other hard-working member of your crew.  And its first corollary is as follows: never allow a crew to regard any individual as more vital to the crew's success than any other member of the crew. 

I could probably write or speak about this topic for days on end and not run out of material.  "There are no stars in rowing" was one of my first coach's favorite refrains, and like many such things, it has progressively gained resonance and made more and more sense with each passing year.  It's as true now as it was when I started rowing in 1987; something that is nearly absolutely true can't get any truer, after all.  But for the sake of anyone reading who isn't already a member of the choir, I'll move on to anecdotes and examples. 

I once had a conversation with another coach about an athlete we both know and have coached who has all the talent and ability she'll ever need and who has had some noteworthy successes but more often than not, performs below expectations - both her own and those of her coaches.  The other coach had known this athlete during her scholastic rowing days and said "You know, when she was rowing eights, her coaches always sort of treated her like she was the franchise player - they even sort of said so publicly and in a way that she knew they thought so."  And I thought "bingo - that's what's held her back.  People whose judgment she trusts have given her the impression that it's the other eight jokers in the boat who are sullying her shot at greatness."  And once an athlete is in that mental/psychic space, she's as good as done until she gets back to the combination of confidence, humility, and willingness to train and race like a crazed animal that really moves boats. 

Similarly, I know an athlete whose physiological numbers are off the charts but who somehow hasn't been in very many fast team boats since his high-water mark as a high school rower.  He graduated from college having been part of a crew that didn't do a lot of winning during his tenure in the varsity eight.  Curiously, the same school's current  varsity eight, while by all available accounts lacking anyone of this athlete's abilities, has been achieving remarkably superior results since his departure.  Granted that there could be thousands upon thousands of reasons for that crew's turnaround, one still scratches one's head and wonders how many of those thousands had "I know I'm making the boat go fast - what's the matter with the rest of these nimrods?" as a contributing factor.  All it takes to poison a crew is one guy (or girl, or coach) with even a hint of suspicion that his fellow rowers aren't entirely worthy. 

I remember, too, the guy on my own collegiate crew who came to be widely regarded as our wheel horse.  Fastest on the erg, always in the varsity eight from the fall of his sophomore year onward, etc.  As a senior, virtually everyone assumed he was unbeatable and that we should just go ahead and write his name in Sharpie on six seat of the varsity eight. Our coaches hadn't even seat raced him during his junior year.  Fortunately for us, we had a wise coach that year who did seat race him against three of the other port oars from both the 1V and 2V eights. Astonishingly, he lost twice and narrowly won the third and kept his seat in the 1V by the skin of his teeth.  Even more astonishingly, the whole 1V got a lot faster the week after those seat races.  You needn't wonder whether the humbling reminder lit a fire under that guy or whether beating the unbeatable guy did likewise for the rest of the crew's morale. 

Finally (I'll stop at four for the sake of brevity despite feeling as though I'm just getting started), there's the story that I heard from a younger coach about a high school rower who complained to his fellow rowers "Coach isn't giving me enough credit for everything I do and have done for this crew."  Are you kidding me?  Anyone who even dares to think that needs an immediate attitude adjustment.  Anyone who actually says it should be demoted to a regimen of land-training-only, or maybe just cut, depending on the circumstances.  Fortunately for his coach and his crew, this athlete quit within a couple of weeks, or more precisely, jumped ship to a different program after being wooed by another coach who knew of his dissatisfaction with his circumstance - poached, you might call it, but good riddance in any case.  Some of his fellow rowers probably wept and gnashed their teeth at the time (the arrogant athlete had the crew's best erg time - big deal) but guess what?  That crew won their season-ending championship regatta despite having lost their "star" - who was never a star to begin with (or haven't you been paying attention?).

As soon as you've identified the star on your crew, take him out of the first boat.  He's slowing you down.  No one ever hurts a crew by quitting.  This truth speaks for itself, repeatedly and at every level, if you'll pay close attention. 

These Kind of Hiccups are a Choice

Every coach I know has a hiccup story - even the legends.  It usually involves some combination of outright defiance, or, more heartbreakingly, of athletes making the regrettable miscalculation that their youthful resilience is unlimited.  Here are a couple of variations:

A superbly talented varsity eight knocks on the door of victorious greatness all season, finishing a very close second at regatta after regatta to another superbly talented crew (one that will ultimately be named "Crew of the Year," in fact).  In the weeks leading up to their last opportunity to knock off their nemesis, the eight is making remarkable progress, gaining speed and poise all the time.  Guys who haven't mastered rowing in pairs start making breakthroughs in the small boats.  The eight starts to jump in ways that it previously has not.  This already-fast crew senses that it can go even faster, and does.  Then their college's traditional spring party weekend rolls around.  Five guys and the coxswain abstain from beer etc./staying up all night etc.  Three guys get drunk and are found carousing in that state, at the boathouse, after hours (of course, right?  Everyone knows the boathouse is the right destination for the end of a great, blotto collegiate evening).  Two weeks later, the crew loses to its nemesis by a few tenths of a second in their final opportunity, at the biggest championship regatta they attend annually.  Even if they had stayed sober,  they might still have lost, but that's not the point - those three guys wilfully and with forethought threw a hiccup into the process.  As it turned out, the coach never would have found out had the campus police not told the assistant athletic director about the incident at the boathouse.  That, of course, is not the point either.  Their hangover hiccuped the crew's preparation.  It's unforgivable, even though it happens all the time.  But it permanently branded that crew an also-ran who threw away their shot, and gave them all something to regret.  Had those three stayed sober, they could have crossed the finish line a deck down and known they did everything they could.  Since they didn't, they're stuck forevermore as the crew that might have broken through and conquered but chose not to.  Irrespective of the outcome, the difference is huge. 

Story 2: A pair of high school crews, one of each gender.  The boys have been chasing their archrivals all year and getting closer all the time, the girls haven't lost all year but have seen their rivals close the gap recently.  Both are looking forward to a huge out-of-town regatta at which they are fast enough to medal if not win.  Before the penultimate race of the season, several of the boys sneak out after curfew.  The only senior in the boat tries to dissuade them from doing something stupid, but the muddle-headed juniors prevail, probably saying "dude - coach is already in bed - he'll never know" or something even more sophomoric if not vulgar.  As icing on the cake, they then break one of the crew's very few non-negotiable rules of away regattas: no boys in girls' rooms and vice-versa.  They get caught.  The coach and the school have no ethical choice but to prohibit them from going to the out-of-town championship race.  The members of the crew who had no part in nor knowledge of the transgression can't compete either because there aren't enough of them to fill the planned entries.  Rotten luck for them to have their fates dictated by somebody else's hiccup. 

Of course it will happen again, countless times this year, in fact.  That's not the point.  The point is that such hiccups, in contrast to the literal kind, are entirely preventable.  Don't choose them and your crew won't get them.  Guaranteed. 

I Hear the Rotors In the Distance - Receding, I Hope

I received a phone call the other day from a parent who was looking to do something on his child's behalf.  It was an understandable scenario - certainly nothing that, by itself, should result in this parent being accused of hovering, or helicopter parenting, as it has come to be called in the last decade or so.  Be that as it may, it did remind me of the phenomenon and so it got me talking to another coach about parenting and that got me a little wound up on the subject.  So let me lay out this message, tell a couple of stories, and hope for the best - if it doesn't produce a revolutionary change in the culture, at least maybe I'll get a mild catharsis out of it. 

Okay - never mind the aw-shucks, let's-not-take-life-too-seriously tone of the above.  This is too important.  Parents, hear this: You've been getting it dead wrong for the better part of a generation.  Much of what you think of as good parenting is in fact bad parenting.  The most important thing you can do for your children is allow them to fail.  That's right - allow them to fail.  And when they do (and they will), you can react in any number of ways, as long as one of them does not involve fixing the problem yourself or making a phone call to pull whatever strings you know to pull to get the thing worked out in your child's favor. 

In the conversation I had with the other coach, I had offered the opinion that although overparenting seems to be this generation's cross to bear, it's probably better than the other side of the spectrum, or neglect.  His response was "I'm not sure about that - depends how long it takes them to learn to cope!"  And that's it, really, isn't it?  What is a twenty-something to do when he's never had to have a hard conversation with a teacher because his parents always did it for him once the conversation became challenging?  When I hear stories like the one about the guy fresh out of law school whose mother allegedly called the senior partner who was his nominal boss to gripe about his workload, I always assume that they are urban legends - more fable than actual occurrence.  But then fables are often intended to instruct, and are inspired by the desire to rectify some human shortcoming or vice, and thus must reflect some seed of reality.  In the interest of mollifying the skeptics, though, here's a true story: shortly before my stepdaughter graduated from the high school where I had been teaching for a number of years, I received a phone call from one of my colleagues who worked in the college guidance office.  One of the subsidiary concerns of the college guidance office in any prep school is the class rank of each member of the graduating class, since that is a useful tool on both sides of the college admissions process.  They had miscalculated one student's GPA and so my stepdaughter's class rank was, in fact, one position higher than we had previously been told it was.  My colleague was sure that I would be horrified, and she was pre-emptively reassuring me of how sorry she was, and she honestly seemed to expect that I would be righteously indignant.  Although she had graduated near the top of her class, nothing much was at stake in her rank moving up or down one notch.  It didn't affect who was the valedictorian or the salutatorian.  It didn't even make a difference in who any of the top 10% "Honor Graduates" were, and even if it had, they caught the error in time to fix it before graduation.  Because the school did not publish class rank or provide it to colleges, it could not possibly have affected any of her college admissions decisions.  It was a complete non-issue, and no one in my family had given it a moment's thought prior to my colleague's call.  And even after my repeated assurances of all of this, my colleague didn't seem to grasp that I was not upset, nor was my wife nor my stepdaughter.  She apparently thought that I was just being polite, and continued to verbalize her regret about the error, still waiting for the storm to break over her.  Clearly, she had already had too many conversations that had gone the other direction: "what do you mean, you miscalculated!?  My daughter's class rank was actually 7th and it was reported as 8th?!  Do you realize how catastrophic this could have been to her ENTIRE LIFE?!"  It was all I could do not to giggle at the thought. 

I sat through graduation as I always did, and was alternately buoyed by the happy solemnity and serene pomp of the occasion and bored stiff by the tedious repetition of academic liturgy, as I always was.  And I was neither more nor less proud of my stepdaughter than I would have been if she'd been salutatorian or graduated 83rd.  High school graduation is, in fact, a bit of a big deal, but it's not V.E. Day, for god's sake.  And I don't remember my wife or I ever having picked up the phone to call one of her teachers to explain why an absence should be excused or why a B+ should have been an A or any of that nonsense.  I claim no particular virtue thereby - I learned this behavior from two sources.  One was my father, who had always behaved likewise.  I didn't know until many years after I had graduated which of my teachers he had believed were not up to snuff because the old man was wise enough to know that nothing good could come from his giving me an excuse to think less of any of them.  As it turned out, he had some pretty salty opinions of some of them, and it unquestionably could not have benefitted me or my teachers for me to have known them when I was in high school.  The other was having been a teacher myself, and I believe that, for the same reason that everyone should have to wait tables before they ever pick up a check in a full-service restaurant, everyone ought to have the experience of being a classroom teacher before they ever send a child of their own off to school. 

I'll close with my favorite story of an educator dealing with an "involved" parent.  As it happens, the educator was a crew coach, and the parent wanted to know, predictably enough, why his son wasn't in the varsity eight.  After it became clear where the conversation was headed, the coach stopped the parent and said "Mr. Sanderson [not his real name], we can have this conversation if you like, but my experience has shown that every syllable we exchange on this matter diminishes your son's likelihood of success."  That was a conversation ender, and the coach not only kept his job but has continued to coach championship crews ever since. 

Keep your children from imminent danger and genuine abuse.  Answer their questions.  Assure them that they are resourceful enough, intelligent enough, and resilient enough to solve their own problems, and let them do it.  A skinned knee is a blessing, and not knowing how to talk to your professor when you're eighteen or your boss when you're twenty-three is a curse.  Step away from the phone.  Have a glass of iced tea, take a deep breath, and count your blessings.  And occasionally remember to thank your child's teachers and coaches for holding them accountable - that's what they really should be paid to do.

If it Doesn't Work With Alcohol...

I'll tread some dangerous ground in order to make use of an analogy that I hope will resonate, and at the risk of being accused of an apples to oranges comparison (boy, I'm coming to hate that figure of speech).  So let's get right to it, then: the vast majority of people who drink, even those who drink more than they should, are nevertheless aware that drinking to excess does not optimize the drinking experience.  Every sensible person who drinks knows that if two beers in an evening puts a nice glow on one's outlook, it does not follow that twenty beers will multiply that glow by a factor of ten.  Rather it will likely result in a miserable evening and day after spent wishing that one had stopped closer to two (if not alcohol poisoning, blackout, and death).  Somewhere between two and twenty, there's an optimal point and a bit past that is a tipping point where the nice buzz tips over to one or a few too many.  Our struggles to know exactly where that is aside, most of us understand, both intuitively and through experience, that too much is too much, and most of us learn to moderate our intake accordingly. 

If that is true of drinking, might it not also be true of training?  Why does there seem to remain such a culture of excess in training, particularly among those who aspire to the status of elite athlete?  Why are so many athletes so foolishly attached to the idea that if a 5x3 minute interval workout is good, then 9x3 minutes must prove to be even better?  Why do we so often fail to even ask if 4 X 3 or even 3 X 3 might not be optimal?  I recall reading last year on the blog (or was it a Facebook post?) of a rower aspiring to make the Olympic team that this athlete had done an AT workout of something like 8 X 10 minutes and promptly followed that up with a post-row of something like 400 burpees, 400 pullups, and 200 one-legged squats on each leg (one wonders where the coach derived those numbers - did it "sound good"?).  That afternoon, the athlete followed it up with a 7 mile run on hilly terrain.  The days bookending that day were similarly loaded with hard training.  There was, predictably, no chronicle of the quality of rest that this athlete took either before or after.  More must be better, right?  Maybe the only rest was fitful sleep between bouts of grim intensity and willpower. But perhaps this athlete was mistaken: could it have been that 50 one-legged squats per leg during that training cycle was optimal and 200 was about four times too many?  It's worth noting that this same athlete is currently training at far less volume and seems to be faster than s/he was at that point.  Admittedly, it could be that the crazy intensity six months ago is driving the speed s/he has now, but it also could be that the seemingly insane volume of six months ago was counterproductive from the get-go. 

I also recall seeing a video clip of a Dutch rower who contrasted what he regarded as the stereotypically American mentality toward training of "I'll do as much as I have to in order to get faster and if that means four-a-days that's what I'll do" - with what he thought of as the more stereotypically Dutch mentality of "How much do I have to do in order to attain world-class speed?  That's what I should do - why would I work myself to a nub if I don't have to?" 

Wherever the optimal point is, it behooves us all to discard the foolish idea that more training is inherently better for us.  It doesn't work with alcohol, why would it work with intervals, AT, etc.? 

I'll close with another chestnut whose source I have forgotten and therefore cannot footnote but will not claim as my own: Most people's easy workouts are too hard and their hard workouts are not hard enough.  If your race pace and faster outings are of sufficient quality, you probably don't need to train to exhaustion as often as you might think. 

It's the combination of high quality training and high quality recovery (including both easy outings and outright rest) that produces speed.  The best athletes find the balance.  Good luck, and remember to stop well short of twenty. 

Modern High School and its Discontents

Sports Illustrated runs a recurring item entitled "This Week's Sign of the Apocalypse," highlighting something particularly absurd and ridiculous in sport.  I'll up the ante and offer the past two decades' sign of the apocalypse within the rowing world, and it is this: high school crew coaches telling their athletes with a straight face that they need to start specializing in rowing at the age of fourteen (or earlier).  This argument is so tremendously flawed that I don't really even know where to begin savaging it.  But since it's summer at Craftsbury and that means daily conversations with Pepa Miloucheva and Lisa Schlenker, let's just start there.  Pepa and I respectfully disagree about a lot of things pertaining to rowing and sculling, but here's something about which she is right on: rowing and sculling are among a small handful of sports that an athlete can never encounter prior to age 20, take up at age 23, and be world-class by age 30.  Try doing that as a nordic skier (forget about it).  Or a gymnast.  Or a swimmer.  While Pepa underestimates the subtleties of movement that rowers and scullers must master to be truly outstanding in their sport, she does not underestimate what it takes, neurologically, to master her own sport of nordic skiing or many others that require the athlete to manipulate his bodyweight in an unfamiliar gravitational environment.  While you might not have to specialize in swimming from age six forward, the door to world-class status is probably closed to you if you start learning to swim when you're 25.  For rowing and sculling, though, the door is still pretty much wide open.  Exhibit A is Lisa Schlenker.  She never picked up an oar until she was 26.  She's got two World Championship Silver medals in the ltwt single in her closet (or drawer or shoebox, or framed, I don't know which) and a trip to the Olympics in the ltwt 2X behind her.  Rowing may, in fact, be at the very top of the list of sports in which early specialization is not only unnecessary, but also potentially damaging to the long-term success of its participants.  So what such coaches are saying to you boils down to this: You should specialize in a sport that doesn't really require specialization, so that four years from now you can lose races to people who are better athletes than you because four years ago they were playing two other sports in addition to rowing.  Ask any collegiate coach at any level to tell you a story about a recruited athlete who rowed exclusively in high school and got steamrolled in the spring by stronger, fitter, more athletic walk-ons.  Most coaches I know have a dozen or more such stories.  This is not to knock participation in high school crew, but rather to discourage the crabbed outlook that assumes it guarantees anything or that multiple seasons of it is better than a single season for a multi-sport athlete.

So here's my message to high school coaches who are exerting subtle or not-so-subtle pressure on their athletes to stop playing other sports and focus exclusively on rowing: Stop it.  Stop it right now.

And the corollary message to parents of high school athletes and the athletes themselves: If your crew coach is telling you that you need to row ten or eleven months out of the year to the exclusion of participation in other sports, remind yourself to consider the source.  It may seem to be in your coach's best interest for you to train exclusively in rowing or sculling - he's got a trophy case to fill and a resume to build, after all, but hear this carefully and thoroughly: it won't make you a better human being, or even a better athlete, or even a better rower or sculler in the long run.  Here's a true statement: one of the most recurrent complaints that collegiate rowing coaches have about their rowers is lack of general, all-around athleticism.  And early specialization cannot teach that or provide an environment in which it is likely to develop.  I shudder to think what kind of athlete and sculler I would be if I had not participated in half a dozen other sports prior to finding rowing at age 20.  The truth is that I've learned valuable things that enrich my enjoyment of and proficiency in sculling from nearly every sport I've ever tried.  Further, if you ditch your other sports in order to devote yourself exclusively to crew, you miss out on one of the greatest opportunities of American adolescence.  Middle school and high school afford us the opportunity to participate in multiple team sports for a very short span of years, and almost none of us will ever get that opportunity again in any meaningful sense.  Quick - name an adult amateur soccer league that inspires commitment and devotion on a par with high school sports (trick question - there's not one).  We will become adults, embark on careers, perhaps get married and have children, and so on.  Playing pickup basketball can be tons of fun, but it will never match the experience of sharing a season, in uniform, with your peers.  And if you enjoy and are proficient at more than one sport, you should allow yourself the opportunity to play more than one sport, and the devil take anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.  

Here's the healthier alternative: commit yourself to being a fit, strong, athlete on a year-round basis.   Never allow yourself to get "out of shape."  If you enjoy more than one sport, go ahead and commit to participate in more than one sport.  And if you find at 16 or 17 that your real interest in your other sports or your aptitude for them is waning and you are inclined to devote more time and passion to crew, then do that.  And if your crew coach can't handle that, find another crew coach.

Full disclosure, complete with convenient rationalization: I coached high school crew for fifteen years, and more of my scullers were one-sport athletes than were multi-sport athletes,  but I was never comfortable with that and did my best to encourage people to be involved with a second sport (or third, in exceptional cases).  So if you're one of my former athletes or crew parents and are reading this and thinking "really?  Is this the same guy?" then I sincerely apologize for having failed to render this message as emphatically or to articulate it as precisely as I should have.

Res ipsa loquitur.  Avoid the coming apocalypse and its attendant craziness.