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.
