Coaching for 30 years at UT, Bill Dunlap has led the women’s crew team has won five Dad Vail Regattas. This year’s team is comprised of 15 student-athletes. | Dana Schwarz/facebook.com
It’s 5:42 a.m. on a Thursday morning. I receive a text as I’m getting oriented and ready to function on a few hour’s sleep. “You up?” it asks. I am, barely.
I stumble down to the lobby of Austin Hall and meet up with Melissa Ciesielski and her boyfriend, Taylor Noonan. As we begin to walk across campus, I notice that they don’t seem quite as shocked by the early morning as I am. After all, this is what they do, six days a week.
The University of Tampa is simply eerie at this hour. It’s mid-February. It’s not cold, but it’s not nearly warm either. I’ve been instructed to wear a jacket and jeans, because it’s going to get colder where I’m going.We make it to our destination, the Boathouse, just before 6:00 a.m.
Ten or 15 people huddle around, discussing this and that and who has injuries and who has tests and whether athletics comes before sports. Soon though, Coach Dunlap will come with a clipboard and assignments, we’ll be out on the water and crew practice will begin.Most people may think they know about crew. But chances are, they don’t. I knew very little myself. I came in with no previous concept of what a coxswain or a Tabata was. I like to think I picked it up rather quickly.
The first thing the women did at practice was decide on a boat size. There are four basic sizes for boats in rowing. There’s an eight, a four, a two and a single; the number just tells how many people rowing in the boat. The women usually work in the fours to prepare for races, but because of a few people missing, they had to adjust to an eight. Although they had the right amount of rowers for two boats, they didn’t have an equal allotment of size and they were missing a coxswain.
The coxswain (pronounced “cox-sin”) or cox, is one of the most misunderstood positions in all of sports. Surprisingly, in such a strength-intensive sport, the coxswain performs no physical labor during a race. Instead, they head the mental sector of the competition. They steer the boat, and act as “the coach on the water,” according to Nathalia Severeyn, one of the two full-time coxswains on the varsity women’s team.
There are positives and negatives to the job.
“I like telling people what to do,” Severeyn says. “But if something ever goes wrong, it’s the coxswain’s fault.”
Her biggest frustration is people dismissing her role as part of the team because she doesn’t physically move the boat forward. The coxswain must be the eyes of the boat, though, as well as watch the currents, be aware of the speed, and most importantly, give guidance and encouragement to the rowers. A few simple words to keep the athletes motivated can be the difference between 1st and 2nd place.
The cox is equipped with a microphone that makes it possible to be heard from the back of the boat, and a mechanism that measures strokes per minute.Normally, rowing is a sport reserved for the large and strong, but this position gives shorter and smaller people a chance to be a key part of competition. Because they’re not rowing, the bigger the coxswain is, the more dead weight the boat has. In coxswain terms: less is more. Severeyn states her height very proudly.
“I am five feet and three quarters of an inch.”As the girls move the boat out to the dock, I notice a bird waking up and walking towards the team. I continue with them, and the bird follows.“Beware of the duck!” says Sam Burns, the other varsity coxswain. “You’ve been warned.”
“The Duck” is a sort of local at the Boathouse. It has green and black body feathers with a red and white speckled head.Melissa Ciesielski fills me in on all I need to know about this creature.
Named Carlton by the women’s varsity team, he is known by a few other names around campus she says. “Duckie” by Coach Dunlap, and another name she’s unsure of by the residents of the Boathouse.Carlton was found with a broken wing when Coach Dunlap rescued him. At first, the crew team loved the bird and enjoyed his company, but it’s been downhill since then, Ciesielski says.
“We started off liking him, but now he’s just starting to get kinda mean,” she said. “It’s like a love, hate, fear relationship. Cause you’re sitting there like ‘don’t bite me, don’t bite me.’”Although Carlton has yet to hurt anyone at UT, it’s common knowledge at this point to steer clear of the duck.
After watching the girls lift their boat out to the river, I am told that I’ll be accompanying Coach Dunlap in the launch, or motorboat. Honestly, as I walk over to the second dock, I am not sure if Coach still remembers that I was coming out with the team for the day. He seemed focused intently on setting up the boat, making sure all the practice supplies were in order. I breathe a sigh of relief when I notice he had thrown two life preservers in the launch.
Coach Bill Dunlap is a very interesting man. He’s quiet to converse with and he coaches barefoot. If you talk to any of his team, they may have an anecdote or an opinion about his coaching style, but they’ll all agree on one thing: the man knows a lot about rowing.
He’s been coaching crew at UT for 30 years and has had quite a bit of success. In 1987, his women’s lightweight four won the 1987 U.S. Collegiate Championship, as his novice team did the same in 1988. He’s overseen the program as it became an NCAA sport (the women’s team at UT is an NCAA sanctioned team, though the men’s team is not.)
Dunlap’s relationship with his rowers is different than a lot of other coaching relationships. He doesn’t believe in pushing his athletes too hard, because he is adamant that the education comes before results. After all, he used to be a teacher; a biology teacher at UT to be exact, coming close to receiving his doctorate before turning to coaching full-time because, well, “coaching is more fun than teaching.”
His science background is apparent to the rowers. The word is that he can identify just about any type of bird seen from the river.But his coaching technique can be misunderstood by some and lost on others. His subtlety can come across like he almost doesn’t care, said Severeyn.
“It’s like he’s your dad, but you don’t talk that much,” she said. “It’s like a distant fatherly figure from the 1950s. But I think a lot of what we [originally] thought was a lack of motivation on his part, was actually a reflection of our own lack of motivation.”
We make our way out to the middle of the river. It’s much colder out on the water, and I’m wishing I had worn a thicker jacket. The women finish their warm-ups and begin their workouts. First a Tabata, or interval training. They have to push as hard as they can for 20 seconds before taking it easy for 10. They repeat this as many times as the coach desires.For the drills today, the women’s eight is matched up with the men’s four. Although the women have double the personnel, it ends up relatively equal because of the difference in strength. Competition is very important in the sport to continually motivate throughout workouts. As the Tabata gets underway, Coach Dunlap yells commands and strategies at his boat through a plastic megaphone.
“Fight these guys off now, in the middle of the piece!” Dunlap shouts, “Even if it means you’re going to die at the end! That’s what a boat race is!”After the Tabata, the team rests and starts a “5, 4, 3” workout. This is an endurance drill that has the team rowing hard for five minutes down the river, a small break, then four minutes up the river, another small rest then three minutes as hard as they can back down.
Amidst all the screaming from the coach and the coxes and the rowers, I was able to look around and see South Tampa waking up. With gulls flying up above and cold water spraying behind the boat, it seems the 5:30 a.m. wake up may have been worth it. From what I’ve been told, the early morning seems more like a privilege than a chore to these young women, and I’m getting a glimpse as to why.
The team might not be perfect, or even great by professional standards, but I’m nonetheless in awe at how synced these nine humans can be with one another. I don’t even think they realize what they’re doing. They can’t. They push and pull and push and pull, until they’ve pushed and pulled enough to win or lose a race.It’s not in the job description to look around and be amazed. But I was. This was a team, striving for something in the wee morning hours, working hard.
Together.
And I think that’s the point of this thing.
There’s a lot more to rowing than meets the eye, and a lot more that I have yet to understand. But I’m fairly certain of one thing: this sport is beautiful.
Miles Parks can be reached at mparks@spartans.ut.edu.
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