It’s a sunny weekday morning outside the local coffee shop and I’m waiting to meet my former coach, Andy Nelder.
It’s important to note that I was not selected for a boat when Andy was my coach and that we haven’t always seen eye to eye on everything. However, I have great respect for his technical knowledge and ability to bring that to crews. This year, Andy left what was then OUWBC after a 22-year-long stint with the Oxford boat clubs. He first coached the lightweight men for five years, then went on to be Assistant Coach of the openweight men for eleven years and finally spent the last six years with the openweight women.
Andy had a somewhat unusual start to his coaching career, beginning in Hong Kong where he was located for work, before moving to college coaching in Cambridge for several years. After some stints in London clubs, in 1997 Andy found himself at Oriel College, Oxford and in Oxford he stayed.
He lost only twice in the sixteen years before he moved to the women’s side.
“I don’t believe that I went from being an okay rowing coach to being a terrible rowing coach by moving across the corridor. Others may argue differently.”
Andy Nelder
It became clear as we spoke that Andy believes he has seen a change of motivation in athletes over the past two decades; “I think that students, as a whole, have become less willing to compromise on the range of things they want to do while they’re at university. They want to do everything their way in a manner that doesn’t inconvenience them and rowing at this level is inconvenient.” I must admit that, from my experiences within the squad, I disagree with Andy. Of course, there are always differing levels of commitment among athletes, but it takes an extremely high level of commitment to balance 40 hours of training a week on top of labs, essays and other academic commitments. Moreover, after several years of curtailment due to Covid-19, it’s really only normal that people in their early 20s value socialising. Demands on students are extremely high and all the athletes I know in the rowing squads have their eyes wide open to the ‘inconveniences’ of high-performance sport. In my opinion, that only makes them that more motivated to do what they can to balance those demands.
“I just think it makes running a sports team very difficult. It’s a team, people who have to operate and come together. If it’s all a bit piecemeal or you’re trying to individualise it week to week there are performance issues that are unavoidable. 20 years ago, people were delighted to be doing it and would move things around to make it work and that’s increasingly less common.”
Andy Nelder
Having coxed both the men’s and women’s teams at Oxford, I was intrigued to see if he felt there to be differences between coaching men and women.“I think the management of the people is different and I think, at Oxford, the groups have got dissimilar views about what’s necessary to be successful. But I also think that’s changing; the men’s programme is moving more towards the women’s team” he explained.
This brought us to discuss the merger, where Andy was party to many of the discussions prior to his departure. He assures me that it was the students who lead the initial push to merge. “On the professional side of things, the clubs were pretty similar anyway. The streamlining had been done… Why have four separately constituted organisations with four committees and four sets of coaching staff?”
At the end of the day, the athletes each year are focused on training as hard as possible for the day that counts. Both the women and the men, in my experience, want the same thing – to win. The atmosphere at OUBC these days is electric. I went down for an afternoon’s training recently and the number of boats and athletes was more reminiscent of Brookes than the Oxford I previously knew. Knowing you are a part of something is only more fuel for the cold, hard months ahead.
After six losses with the Oxford openweight women, there was some tension surrounding Andy’s departure but it would be shortsighted to see only that. Andy credits the past season with the women’s Blue Boat as one of his favourite in the past two decades. “They were really inexperienced people, but they were a delight. They made huge progress. They rowed way way above their level really and executed their plan very very well.”
“Can you have added an enormous amount to people’s ability, fitness, experience of Oxford, and to the club as a whole in the years that you lose? Well yes, you can.”
Andy Nelder
Andy is no stranger to coaching underdog crews, such as his first year with the Oxford lightweight men. “No one gave us a prayer. Cambridge had a bunch of U23s in their boat, Oxford had lost by six lengths the previous year, and someone had died on training camp. So we picked up a pretty broken team and put it together – a super group of people who trained really hard, turned up and put two lengths into Cambridge. A fantastic day, really.”
To an outsider, the pressure on coaches of the Boat Race might not be immediately evident. The seasons are short at only six months and athlete turnover is high. This gives you very little time and a lot to do. Andy states adaptability to be one of the most important qualities in a good rowing coach, and this is certainly doubly true for a Boat Race squad. “As a rowing coach you spend the entire time, whether you’re winning or losing, questioning if you’re doing the correct thing,” he said. And, though the Boat Race is the most watched rowing event in the world, “they’re grossly under-supported if you compare them to the American collegiate programmes. There’s no money, they’re under a permanent financial strain. As Head Coach, you have to wear the pressure as lightly as possible.”
All things must come to an end but with endings come beginnings. Andy is excited to have the opportunity to look for another long term project (“while I’m still young enough to do it!”) and the Oxford women have begun a new chapter as part of a merged OUBC. After 22 years with Oxford, Andy is the godfather of some former athletes’ children, has been invited to countless weddings and has had an impact on hundreds of athletes. He has coached winning boats that were underdogs, led through a pandemic and learnt from the losses. Unfortunately, a win with the Oxford women was not to be but who knows what these new chapters hold for both sides.
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