Ask nearly any non-rower about the sport and they’ll tell you that rowing is a rich, white, posh-person’s sport. Complete with jargon, strange unisuits, and cult-like atmosphere, it can certainly be intimidating for those looking to try the sport for the first time. There are also many practical challenges facing rowers – the high cost of membership (often over £350 a year for adults) and, if you want to race, the eye-watering cost of unisuits. These barriers help explain why, according to British Rowing’s 2021 Diversity and Inclusion Survey, just 10% of the rowing community are from lower socio-economic groups, compared to 47% nationally; likewise, 27% of rowers attended independent schools, compared to 7% nationally.
British Rowing’s Committed to Inclusion Policy
Fulham Reach Boat Club is a registered charity and rowing club, with a vision of “Rowing for All”. They proactively reach out to the local community to encourage as many people to try rowing as possible, regardless of background. Their four charity projects target state-school students, children on free school meals, the local community, and prisoners. As Steve O’Connor, Chief Operating Officer of Fulham Reach BC, put it, it’s about ‘trying to make a positive difference in their lives through rowing’. I spoke to Steve about how rowing can be made more inclusive.
Rowing is quite an expensive sport for a lot of people. How can clubs encourage people to try rowing and then continue with the sport?
The big problem for everyone at the moment is the cost of living. Clubs doing what they can to keep costs down is a great way to support members. That goes across the board – unisuits, boats and everything else – whatever we can do to squash those prices down, that will no doubt help members. The other thing is just to help members feel part of their boat club community, not just see them as a member or transactional but make it about how the club interacts with that member and what members can do to help the wider membership base and make it feel a bit more homely.
Many clubs focus heavily on racing and ignore people who want to row recreationally. Do you think that’s a wider problem in the sport?
That’s a massive problem in the sport. Most clubs are set up to race and judge success by how well they do at events. Racing is in the DNA of the sport – I think racing is great and it’s a great pathway. But I certainly don’t think racing is the be-all-and-end-all of the sport. Certainly, at Fulham [Reach BC], we’ve seen a massive swathe of people who want to just go out and paddle and enjoy paddling. They’ll push themselves when they want to and we’ll do informal racing when they want to, but they don’t care about doing Wallingford, Met, Marlow qualifiers and then maybe getting through a round; that’s just not why they do it.
Clubs see a massive turnover of members as members are trying to find a club to win something with. I think if clubs don’t think about that wider provision of “how do we just help people enjoy the sport and get on the water?”, they could find themselves in trouble and with declining membership numbers.
I also think one thing we found is that it’s quite difficult to recruit full-time coaches who just want to work with recreational clubs. We’ve struggled with that recently. I think that’s because, with a recreational club, while you can have a great organisational club behind you and certainly our team [at Fulham Reach BC] invest in training and development and make sure everyone’s qualified, the reality is they’re not going to leave Fulham Reach BC with a big win for their CV. That motivates a lot of the coaches because a lot of clubs focus on racing.
If we can start changing the culture slightly – not changing it but just adding to it – so that we have really solid recreational programmes that are safe and enjoyable and well-run as a feather in people’s caps, then we can probably solve the coaching issue as well.
It’s important for a lot of people to look at coaches and see people higher up in rowing from the same background as them. How do we support people from lower socio-economic and ethnic minority backgrounds become coaches?
I think we need to have the coaching conversation with people much earlier. I think as soon as people start rowing, we should be thinking about coaching and how we can get them on the pathway to coaching. For example, as a junior you start volunteering with the younger age groups and then you can get Level 1s and 2s as you get a bit older in your rowing. British Rowing can help by having more courses that are easier to access and always if they’re cheaper, we’re going to get more people into coaching. It can sometimes be slightly difficult to access the coaching courses needed to get qualified.
Maybe, if we are really keen to open up the cultural diversity of the coaching pool, we need to look at people who aren’t currently in rowing and see if we can teach them to row; find really great coaches in other sports, teach them how to coach rowing but then already have them as great coaches in their own right and bring them into the sport that way.
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