It is a truth, generally well acknowledged, that the best time to step away from something is when it is at its peak. You can reflect on the good times, react to the highs of victory and enjoy leaving something behind in a better state than you found it. But it’s rarely discussed how difficult it is to then take on another challenge immediately afterwards. How do you re-build, re-brand, re-design a plan, a program that fits one model so well but may not be applicable universally?
For Antony Smith, or Smithy as he’s commonly known, this was the conundrum he faced when stepping down from his role as Assistant Director of Rowing at St Paul’s School. Under the leadership of both Smithy and Bobby Thatcher, St Paul’s had re-wrote the history book on junior rowing and how it is supposed to be done. They’d won the historic Triple, smashed the record for the Princess Elizabeth Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta and filtered numerous athletes through to the GB Junior team. For Smithy, who had been at the school since 2013, this was the best moment to make a change.
It worked out as a perfect narrative – coaching the boys from J14s to world champions in the eight last summer”.
“I’ve always wanted to run my own big programme,” he explained, when catching up with Junior Rowing News at the end of November. “Things just made sense. I’ve had a really great time at St Paul’s and then obviously this year with the boys doing so well it seemed like the right time to leave, to come out of the shadows if you’d call it that and run my own programme. It worked out as a perfect narrative – coaching the boys from J14s to world champions in the eight last summer”.
They were long shadows indeed, cast by the success he’d enjoyed at St Paul’s but Smithy now runs the rowing program at Lady Eleanor Holles School, one of the UK’s premier rowing institutions. His immediate challenge? Try and find a way to beat Headington and Henley. “What Ryan (Demaine) has done at Headington is pretty impressive,” conceded Smithy. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to emulate that. But the most important piece of advice I’ve had is to take your time with it, be patient. In the first few weeks, I could feel myself thinking about changing this and that but we can’t do it all in one big jump. Instead, we need to take smaller steps to where we want to go and just focus on bringing in a strong culture”.
That’s an interesting point and one that was raised when we discussed what Smithy had taken away from St Paul’s. “A proper training culture is crucial, perhaps the most important thing,” he notes. “We were quite fortunate as a group of coaches that we all thought similarly in terms of rowing style and technique, so that was a very natural thing between us and obviously understanding how Bobby was wanting the coaching to be done. So my role as J16 coach was to develop the boys for the programme that they would be doing in the senior squad and to learn the main points that Bobby was looking for in terms of volume and intensity. That’s where the culture comes in”.
I’ve got a lot of history with the machine but it’s probably the closest in terms of feel that you can get off the water on a machine
In this age of modern technology, every single aspect of performance can be tracked and measured – coaches are constantly seeking ways to emulate the improvements made on the ergo to those sought after on the water. St Paul’s, as is well documented, are huge fans of the RP3 and Smithy knew immediately which training tool he had to have at LEH. “I’ve been using RowPerfect since about 2001 at Tideway Scullers,” he explained. “I’ve got a lot of history with the machine but it’s probably the closest in terms of feel that you can get off the water on a machine. Obviously, in the boat you get that dynamic movement of drawing the boat up to you and the overall feel of the shell beneath. You’ve got the bungee pulling you up the slide on a standard ergo and the slope of the slide so you get a different feel of the change in direction on a Concept 2 but it doesn’t replicate what you feel on the water”.
According to Smithy though, the RP3 will give you that – the holy grail of rowing-related feedback. And there’s more.
“It’s the ability to actually coach on them with comprehensive feedback that makes the RP3 so fantastic. You can use a land session to embed proper coaching that can be translated onto the water. At LEH, we do a lot of our training after school, so now that it is dark it means that we go to the gym and the feedback we get is invaluable to us”.
I could see massive benefits, especially for crew boats and how you can bring crews together based on the outputs of an RP3.
The success speaks for itself. At St Paul’s – which has fostered world champions and Henley winners in abundance – the athletes would utilise the machine to analyse their power curve, understand their feedback and begin to replicate each other. Rowing has so many conflicting styles and it would be foolish to proclaim there to be a ‘right way of rowing’ – but what is crucial to success is that the athletes in a boat implement the same style together. In Smithy’s words, the RP3 allows you to do that.
A few months into his tenure, and armed with a gleaming batch of RP3s and a phenomenal infrastructure of sport, Smithy has high hopes for his new charges. The focus? A red box and the glistening blue waters of Henley Royal Regatta. “I’m implementing a certain pattern of training from the J15s all the way up to the seniors where we keep the sculling going,” he said. “We want to keep a focus on the quad for the Diamond Jubilee as a long-term project but naturally, with our numbers, fall back into sweep for the major domestic events. This year, we’re pretty much set up to do the Schools’ Head and National Schools’ Regatta in the eight but we will be running a sculling squad parallel to that, with the focus on Henley Royal immediately after.”
In a community of increasing standards and sterner competition, you have to think a little differently to stand above the rest. From years of watching and learning, Smithy has built up his own philosophy and his own culture, leaning on the resources that he trusts and the kids he has nurtured from novices to junior internationals. To leave something perfect behind takes immense courage – but the lure of a brand new horizon is especially attractive to the brave.
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