From the Editor: Rowing’s Golden Age

Sure, the older we get, the faster we were. But even as a card-carrying member of that club, I offer for your consideration the following declaration:

The sport of rowing is in its golden age, the best era in the existence of our sport, dating at least to the 1872 founding of the National Association of Amateur Oarsmen, which combined with the National Women’s Rowing Association in 1982 to give us our United States Rowing Association, currently operating under the brand name USRowing.

As we’ve reported previously, the USRowing Youth National Championship in June broke participation and financial records for the second year in a row. This award-winning event, held on the world-class course at Nathan Benderson Park, was the best it’s ever been in ways that are harder to quantify and measure but plain to see, like a vibrant scene at the venue and the pervasive buzz among youth programs leading up to it.

The Intercollegiate Rowing Association’s 121st anniversary national-championship regatta this year was the biggest ever, as was the American Collegiate Rowing Association’s national championship for college club rowing programs.

Although the NCAA Championships cap participants through a qualifying and bid system, the number of Division I rowing schools will grow as the University of Albany and High Point University launch new women’s varsity rowing programs this fall, followed by the University of Toledo in 2025.

There is, and will continue to be, much handwringing and pearl-clutching about the massive changes occurring in college athletics and how they’ll be paid for. But the coming chaos should present opportunities to strengthen and improve rowing even further.

Some of the best are at it already, such as UCLA and Washington, which are raising multi-million dollar rowing endowments. Others have such endowments already, and still others are cementing their place in the athletic department by providing relatively low-cost athletic experiences for student-athletes with the best academic-progress rates, Olympic representation (41 of Team USA’s 592 Paris athletes are rowers, all of whom went to college), and successful alumni.

Our sport is also its own greatest asset: full-body exercise without concussions or other impact injuries, in which the only way to succeed is to work hard and work together. Moreover, it’s growing beyond the traditional spring racing season. The fall head-racing Big Three—Head of the Charles, Schuylkill, and Hooch—feature their biggest and best fields ever, and Beach Sprint rowing debuts as a full-fledged medal-awarding sport at our home Olympics in LA28.

This is the golden age of rowing in other important ways. The Gay + Lesbian Rowing Federation has promoted inclusion and acceptance in the rowing community successfully for over 20 years. A Rowing News cover story 21 years ago told how rowing was one of the pioneering sports in the Paralympic movement. As USRowing’s director of Para high performance points out in the Rowing News interview, our sport is growing also to include more types of athletes.

From a broader base, rowing is rising to greater heights. 

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