I’ve been in Australia coaching for over a year now, and I’m getting increasingly comfortable with the way that rowing is structured here. As I wrote about in an earlier article with JRN, I believe a great deal of the differences between the way that British and Australian rowing operates is due to easily explained factors regarding the gigantic size of the country, the much smaller population density, and the structure of the seasons in the southern hemisphere.
The main difference in Australian rowing that I was unable to discuss in my previous article is the university or student rowing scene. There is a much smaller amount of student rowing here than I would have expected, especially when the amount of school rowers is considered. The Aussie equivalent of BUCS, the Unigames regatta, usually has about two hundred athletes competing for their universities, a measly ten percent of the two thousand odd that attend the BUCS regatta every year. For a country that is such a powerhouse in rowing, I found it shocking to discover how small rowing for students is here.
Additionally, school rowing in Australia is very big, with a great deal of schools running deep and competitive eights programmes. Some of the biggest rowing schools are based in the state capitals and compete in very intense competition against each other locally. In Victoria alone in 2021, there were over three thousand three hundred junior athletes racing in a single weekend! The retention rate of athletes who continue to row past school is less than ten percent which raises the critical question – why do so few of these young athletes continue to row once they finish school?
I believe there are a number of factors that negatively impact Australian rowing in this regard.
Firstly, the rowing season structure does not align well with the school calendar. Students in their final school year sit their exams at the end of November, and then enjoy their summer off before starting at university at the end of February. The rowing season for schools in Australia runs from September through to the end of March. The result of this is that once a rower finishes their final school rowing season in March, they are likely to be out of training, preparing for and sitting exams. Then they shall spend the summer celebrating before heading off to university. Once arrived at uni, there is barely time to begin training for a crew before it’s the state and national championships. At that point, a young athlete may as well wait until preseason training begins, around August, ready to finally race again in September. By then, the athlete will have not been training or racing in 18 months – I suspect that a good many of them decide not to get back into a boat at all at this point.
On top of this, the majority of young Australians don’t move away from home to attend university, instead attending the local university whilst continuing to live at home. I believe a large part of the success in British university rowing is the social role that rowing fills for students. For those who already row, taking up rowing for their university is often something they’ve thought about for a long time, and is a great way to meet new people. For newcomers to the sport, the logic is often much the same. After moving away from home, people look for something new to do, a way to meet new people. Rowing is often attractive due to the long traditions associated with it, the social aspects of a team sport, and we all already know the virtues of a full body fitness sport with a relatively low injury risk. There is no such drive in Australia, because people aren’t leaving home. The social structure can remain unchanged on leaving school – same friends, because they all still live just down the road. The structure of classes and lessons from school falls away and is replaced by lectures and study, but rowing passes into being something you used to do at school.
So what options are there for young people out of school who are desperate to either continue rowing or to take it up for the first time? Sadly, not many. For those who already know how to row from being a junior, there are a good number of clubs to join depending on your location. There are 2 excellent high-performance clubs in each Sydney and Melbourne with a couple of others scattered around the country. There are a good number of clubs for less aspirational athletes too, but as I discussed in a previous article the competition for young people who aren’t performance oriented is slim.
Finding a learn to row programme would be challenging as a university student here, it’s unlikely you’d find one advertised at a fresher’s fair because most universities don’t have a regular rowing program or own their own fleet. You would have to go digging and researching into local clubs and contacting them to find out if they run a learn to row course. If you manage to find a club that runs one, I expect that one would be disappointed by the volume of similarly aged young people at the club – not many. Most people aged between 18 and 23 that row here do so out of the high-performance clubs, aiming for state team selection. There is tragically little in the space of casual rowing here.
This is a problem that pervades even as a school rower, the competitive drive for the first eight in a school program is high, pressure is mounted on the crews to find success by the weight of the alumnae, a great challenge for young people already dealing with the various stresses of teenage life. I believe that this intense pressure and high training volume creates a large amount of burnout. When this is combined with the factors discussed above it becomes easier to understand why so few school rowers continue to row past high school graduation.
The small size of university rowing in Australia is a great shame, I find it strange that there isn’t more drive by the state and national rowing organisations to keep more school athletes rowing. The success that Australia finds on the international stage is even more impressive when this hole in the sport is considered. I think that perhaps the student rowing scene here could be increased, but it would require a great deal of change to the system – exciting races for final year school students during their final off season, perhaps some freshers only events at the state and/or national championships. I hope that this part of the sport is able to grow but unfortunately I don’t see much changing in the near future.
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