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	Photo: Lewis Smith

Oakland is Rowtown

How to Stroke a Path to Victory on the Estuary

    In Boston where Amy Boyle rowed, college crew teams started their season the second week of March. Sometimes, they had to chip ice off the docks in order to get the boats into the chilly waters of the Charles River.
    Along the Oakland Estuary, the rowing season is year-round, thanks to mostly balmy weather. Boyle, now an assistant coach of the Oakland Strokes, currently spends her days surrounded by busy high school rowers, boys and girls who row on the club team after school and on weekends. There’s no ice in sight.
    If you row, there’s just about no other place you’d rather be than the Estuary, believe it or not. A combination of great weather and a fairly straight waterway has made it one of the most renowned—and, some say, unlikely—places for rowing on the West Coast.
    “It’s every day here,” says Boyle. “It’s never too cold.”
    Just look at the rowing pedigrees of the people you meet along the docks, and you’ll see they come from the East Coast bastions that have long dominated the sport. It’s clear, though, that they have moved West, specifically to Oakland, to be where the current champions of the sport train.
    “I started coaching here before I even had an apartment,” laughs Boyle. She is also a seventh-grade teacher at Madison Middle School in Oakland.
    Boyle rowed for Boston College. Another local with roots back East is Stephen Gladstone, coach of the University of California, Berkeley, varsity men. He rowed for Kent School, a Connecticut prep school, and Columbia University. He has coached at Harvard University and Brown University but has stayed at Cal for 11 years, winning championship after championship.
    And Ian Simpson, Oakland Strokes girls varsity coach, hails from England, where rowing is a venerable tradition. He has coached the U.S. women’s national team and was a member of an international rowing committee in Great Britain.

Why Oakland?

    There are several factors that make the Estuary a desirable place for crew teams. The weather is one obvious reason. Teams work out year-round here, while other clubs close up shop for six months when the weather turns bad in the fall.
    Another positive attribute is the Estuary itself. Surprisingly, some of the waterway’s problems are what make it a good training ground.
    “The Estuary is very challenging,” says Simpson. “It’s very windy and very industrial. It makes the kids focus on what they’re doing. And, if they race in bad conditions, it’s no big deal for our kids, because they’re used to it.”
    The waterway also has some long, straight areas that are perfect for crew, says Robert Kidd, former board president of the Jack London Aquatic Center, the boathouse that houses three crew teams: the Oakland Strokes, Berkeley High School’s team and the JLAC’s own team.
    “There’s no better body of water to train on than the Oakland Estuary,” Kidd says.
    Another reason the Estuary is so popular is because of Cal’s dominance in the sport at the collegiate level. Cal, like Berkeley High, has never rowed in Berkeley, but rather practices on the Estuary and works out of a new boathouse, the T. Gary Rogers boathouse built in 2004 near the Fruitvale Bridge.
    Cal’s old boathouse is there, too, and it houses a program to develop crews for international competition, including a U.S. national team for the Olympics. In fact, the Oakland Estuary has seen its fair share of Olympic glory, dating back to 1928, when there were several Cal rowers who went to the Olympics. The official university athletics Web site, California Golden Bears Web (http://calbears.cstv.com), lists 58 men and 10 women who went on to be Olympic rowers, including Megan Dirkmaat and Laurel Korholz, who both won silver medals in 2004. And Gregory Peck, the Hollywood star who graduated from Cal in 1939, belonged to the university’s rowing team, too, according to the Daily Cal alumni newsletter.
    Today, there are hundreds of high school students and college athletes who row on the Estuary. Oakland Strokes, founded in 1974, has seen its numbers take off in recent years, with 150 to 200 kids currently rowing for the club. The Strokes have plans to build a new boathouse along the Estuary in the next couple years, and the group has received a $3 million grant from the East Bay Regional Parks District toward the project.

Once an Industrial Wasteland

    Ten years ago, though, no one thought the waterfront along the Estuary amounted to much. It was a tangle of rusted, hulking abandoned buildings and warehouses. The waterway was physically and psychologically separated from the rest of the city by the Interstate 880 freeway and the Amtrak train tracks.
    “That part of Oakland was just a forlorn and forgotten part of the city,” says Kidd. “In the early ’90s, the Oakland waterfront didn’t exist as far as the public was concerned.”
    It took a group of visionaries—former Berkeley High School crew coach Vincent Horpel, Gladstone and Kidd, a lawyer, who used to row—to see a future for the Estuary that no one could have predicted.
    This group, along with Oakland’s League of Women Voters, believed the waterfront had potential. After years of surveys and studies, one of which was commissioned by the league, the group came up with the solution: Make it easy for people to get to the Estuary, and they will come.
    One way to make the waterway more inviting was to build a boathouse. It took several years, but with the city’s blessing and support, the Jack London Aquatic Center was built in 2000. A few years later, in 2004, the organization started a rowing program for girls from Oakland.

College Scholarship Machine

The Estuary teams repeatedly rack up national and international accolades:

    •  The men’s varsity crew at Cal, defending its 2006 Intercollegiate Rowing Association championship on the Cooper River in Cherry Hill, N.J., placed fifth in the nation in May 2007, behind powerhouses Brown, Stanford, Harvard and the Univeristy of Washington. As the 2006 national champs, Cal defeated the rowing elite: Princeton, Brown, Harvard and Yale.

    •  The women’s crew of Cal, who won the NCAA championship regatta in 2006, fell short of winning the national title in 2007, taking seventh place overall at the NCAA championships in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

    •  Eight boats from the Oakland Strokes, including five women’s teams and three men’s teams, earned medals in  the May 2007 regional championships in Sacramento, qualifying them for the U.S. rowing national champtionships in Cincinnati. In 2006, the Strokes varsity women’s team won the gold medal at the 19th annual women’s regatta at Henley, England. It followed the crew’s silver-medal finish at the U.S. rowing national championships in Cincinnati and a gold-medal win at the state championships in Sacramento.

    •  The Berkeley High School boys varsity four-crew boat won a gold medal at the national championships in 2007. They went onto the national championships to dend their title, having won the gold medal in 2006 for the top four-crew boat in the nation.
    Such wins get the attention of college recruiters, who now consider the Estuary a training ground for top college rowers. Crew is a sport with a high
athlete-to-coach ratio—40 crew members to one or two coaches—so it can be an economical way for colleges to meet Title IX regulations that require colleges to accept an equal number of female and male athletes.
    UCLA, Brown, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford: A top list of colleges in the country, yes. But it’s also the list of schools that accepted girls who rowed in spring 2007 in the Oakland Strokes varsity boat.
Claire Veeninga, 18, knows firsthand the benefits of rowing. For years, the 6-foot tall Berkeley resident played volleyball in hopes of landing a college scholarship, without much success. A shoulder injury, however, forced the Bishop O’Dowd student to consider rowing.
    Veeninga started rowing in July 2006, before her senior year of high school, and is a member of the Oakland Strokes novice boat, which is full of beginning rowers. When Veeninga stepped onto the docks at her first regatta, the coach for Cal asked her if she was interested in going to Berkeley.
    Veeninga enters Cal as a freshman in fall 2007 with a partial scholarship for rowing. She says she couldn’t have hoped to get into the university as a volleyball player.
    “Word about rowing hasn’t gotten out enough yet,” says Veeninga. “But it’s up and coming.”
Dedication is key to success in the sport, and only those who really love rowing stay with it. Members of Oakland Strokes train most weekdays after school, for several hours at a time. Saturday mornings at 6 finds them at the boathouse, as well.
    Dana Walsh, a Miramonte High School sophomore, hopes to get to college on a rowing scholarship, too. “I love it,” she says. “It’s more than I expected.”

Obstacles to Overcome

    At the Jack London Aquatic Center rowing program, specifically for girls from Oakland public high schools, a lot has been accomplished in a few short years. Last year, a McClymonds High School graduate and JLAC rower received a full scholarship to row for Cal.
    But the program faces obstacles. Many inner city girls don’t know how to swim, the first step toward being out on the open water in a boat.
    “Many families in Oakland teach their kids to be afraid of the water,” says Kidd, who worked with an outreach program 20 years ago that taught city kids to row at Lake Merritt.
    The JLAC program now picks up the crew members at their high schools and takes them to Temescal Pool, where the Oakland Office of Parks and Recreation runs a swim program.
    The city rowing program is still small, with 18 to 20 girls. Still, with the popularity of rowing on the rise in Oakland, the hope is to start a boys JLAC rowing program in 2008.
    And there is a tradition of rowing in city hall. Mayor Ron Dellums, in his autobiography, notes one of his favorite memories was coaching boys crew on Lake Merritt when he was in his 20s and working for the city’s parks and recreation office. Although he never rowed personally for a team, he says he found rowing to be “an incredible tool for teaching teamwork and collaboration to young people.”
     “It was wonderful seeing how the young people recognize that without working together, in a united effort, the group or team would have very little success making the boat move smoothly through the water,” Dellums says. Erik, his son, enjoyed rowing, too, but the mayor couldn’t recall whether his son had done competitive rowing or just recreational rowing.
    And so today rowing in Oakland is a popular and successful sport, with national and international coaches and athletes coming to the city’s waterfront to train. The Estuary is no longer the lonely, industrial spot it once was, but instead is a flourishing boathouse row.
    “The programs have been very successful in the past five years,” says Simpson, varsity girls coach for Oakland Strokes. “The program has been doing so well, they don’t say, ‘Oakland?’ any more.”

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The Basics of Rowing
    Rowing races can be traced back to the 18th century, when there were friendly competitions between the boat men who would ferry people from either side of the River Thames in London. The races began attracting crowds, and many of today’s rowing regattas, or races, on the Thames are held in honor of those first races.
    Racing boats, sometimes called shells, can accommodate one, two, four or eight rowers, the crew that powers the boat. Originally made of wood, today’s boats are often made of composite materials. The boats are long and narrow to reduce drag.
    Rowers face backward in the boat, and the larger boats, with four or eight members, usually have a coxswain. The coxswain (pronounced cox-in) sits in the stern facing the bow and calls out to motivate the rowers and coordinate the rowers’ strokes in order to get the most power out of a boat. Rowers are numbered, from bow to stern.
    The standard world championship and Olympic race distance is 2,000 meters. Top boats can cover the distance in 5.5 minutes to 7.5 minutes. The distance is 1,500 meters for high school racers, and top teams cover it in about 7 minutes to 7.2 minutes.

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FIND OUT MORE

    Oakland Strokes: Located at the Jack London Aquatic Center, 115 Embarcadero, Oakland, this rowing club serves boys and girls ages 14–18. Mailing address: 4096 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, CA, 94611. Membership: (925) 254-7583. www.oaklandstrokes.org.
    Jack London Aquatic Center: Located at 115 Embarcadero, Oakland, this group serves Oakland public high school students ages 14–18, and offers adult learn-to-row and masters rowing programs. Mailing address: P.O. Box 72347, Oakland, CA 94612. (510) 208-6060. www.jlac.org