Fall rowing on the Might Miss.

Six days a week, usually before sunrise, the Gophers rowing team is awake and ready for practice.

Despite winning two events at the Head of the Mississippi regatta earlier this month, their first race of the fall, rowers caught no breaks from head coach Wendy Davis last Wednesday morning as they powered through two intense, back-to-back nine-minute workouts on the Mississippi River.

Davis watched every stroke closely from a motorized boat, megaphone in hand to help the boats navigate the quirks and currents of the unpredictable river and to instruct her athletes on what they were doing right and wrong. “Molly, you’re catching late,” Davis sternly directed a rower whose oar blade was entering the water slightly behind the others.

“Wendy doesn’t really leave anyone alone,” senior varsity rower Linnea Trandem said, “because there’s always room for improvement.”

Although women’s rowing at the University is a Division I sport, the team holds open tryouts each fall where anyone can try out, regardless of experience. For up to one year, beginning rowers can compete on the novice team, which is Division I as well and competes at most of the same regattas as the varsity team.

That anyone can participate, however, is a bit misleading.

Rowing is tough and the burn-out rate is high, particularly among novices; a result, junior redshirt Alli Fast said, of the level of commitment required and the physical toll exacted by the sport and the additional challenge of keeping up with academics.

In-season training involves lifting weights and running in four-mile stints twice a week.

“It definitely gets really hard,” Fast said of trying to balance school with rowing. “Sometimes it just all seems to pile on one week.”

The team’s new boat house, constructed in 2007 on the East River Flats below the hospitals and Super Block, houses a weight room with around 30 rowing machines and a large oval water tank with oars and benches so rowers can simulate boat rowing and coaches can scrutinize athletes’ technique more closely.

The new boat house is a drastic improvement from the previous one, which Davis called “a tent with a couple of porta-potties.”

Trandem cockswained the Gophers to another win Sunday in the women’s collegiate four event — four rowers and a cockswain — in Rockford, Ill, where Davis’ tough love paid off.

“I think we’re farther along than I remember being this early in the season in any past years,” Trandem said, “so I think we’re in a really good place for our big races coming up.”

Although fall regattas — rowing’s term for “race” — technically count towards the team’s total number of meets for the year, they serve mainly as a preseason gauge of how the team is performing and what adjustments need to be made, while the more important events occur in the Spring.

“[Fall is] an evaluation period,” Trandem said. “It’s seeing who works well together, it’s building up that fitness and that technique level, and hoping it stays while we’re inside for winter training.”

Trandem is an experienced cockswain, the term for the rower positioned at the stern of the boat, without oars, directing and encouraging the other rowers.

Many look at a rowing race and see the cockswain seated at the stern, not rowing and barking orders, and assume they're getting a nice, free ride.

Not so, Trandem said.

“After races I’m as out of breath as [the other rowers] are, if not more so,” she said, “just because while they’re working physically we have to do the work of eight people mentally. Nine, including ourselves.”

The cockswain is responsible for making sure every rower is doing their job, that every oar is in sync and that the boat avoids natural obstacles in the water, all while moving as fast as possible and trying to pass other boats

“Oh, there’s a log in the river. I have to avoid that,” Trandem said as an example of the many thoughts that fly through a cockswain’s mind during a race. “It’s not hard to be a cockswain, [but] it is really hard to be a great cockswain,” Trandem said.

After Wednesday’s workout, the team gathered around Davis in the boat house, where she asked her athletes to share their thoughts on the practice and how they could improve, a common theme for Davis and the team, which has finished fifth and sixth at the past two Big Ten Championships.

“We’re hoping that we’re going to have a different [kind of] year this year,” Davis said. “I [don’t think] it’s a pipe dream…It’s just based on the reality of what we’re seeing and what we’re feeling.”

The work is never done, but so far this year it’s paying off.
Related:
- Audio Slideshow of 6:45 am practice by Mark Vancleave