Club crew team challenges nation’s best varsity squads

At 5:30 a.m. last Thursday, the Christina River appears black among the urban landscape of Wilmington. With hours to go before the start of an early morning rush hour, a light emits from the Wilmington Youth Rowing Association Boathouse, where the Delaware men's crew team, a club sport, begins their Thursday practice.

In a coordinated effort, crew members carefully haul boats to the edge of the wooden pier. Without buildings to block the wind, a chill descends on the edge of the river. Team members brace for a cool practice in nothing more than spandex Under Armour and a tight uniform, while coaches Joe Federici and Chuck Crawford don "survival suits" for added warmth.

Three eight-membered boats line the dock, and as the rowers settle into their seats, Coach Federici steps into his motor boat to lead the day's practice.

The morning begins with a light warm up, where female coxswains sit at the stern of each boat, directing the stroke, pace and coordination of the rowers. As each boat steadily descends the darkened waterway, Federici explains the basics of a rowing technique.

"It's in your back and in your legs," he said.

The practice focused on preparing rowers for their race on Saturday against the Naval Academy, which was canceled due to the weather. With the lightweights placing first in races against varsity-funded programs such as Penn and Columbia, and heavyweights showing a turnaround season, placing second in the Knecht Cup after finishing fourteenth the previous year, Delaware men's crew has had an impressive spring season.

Even though men's crew holds club status at the university, the lightweight team is currently ranked seventh in the nation among varsity level programs and scheduled to compete against the top 10 teams in the country, and according to Crawford, the varsity heavyweights are currently the best the team has seen.

Crawford believes that the team has significantly improved over the years, and with the way the season is going so far he hopes the Hens will continue to do well.

"We set very high expectations, we'd like to be as good as we possibly can and that means continuing to improve from every year," Crawford said. "If we can have our lightweights reach the top five and potentially be the top team in the country—that would be what our goal would be."

Many of the freshmen that try out for the team have little or no high school experience, but Crawford said that unlike most college athletic programs, as long as they are physically able, they can be taught to excel as a rower.

Over the years, Crawford has had members with no former rowing experience advance to national crew teams.

"A kid that is brand new, that has never rowed before, can come to us and we can give him the skills, if he's a good athlete, to become an elite rower," Crawford said.

Although the Hens' club status has the potential of garnering a lack of respect from other varsity-funded programs, Crawford said competitors do not even know that Hens crew is club status.

"When we compete, and I've talked to many athletes from these other schools, they don't know that we're not varsity, they kind of just think that we're a varsity program because we're so good," Crawford said.

Although the Delaware team holds a high reputation among collegiate crew teams, there are still limitations to holding club status, including not being able to compete at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championship, one of the most prestigious races in the nation featuring the top varsity teams.

"We're a club team and we're competing against these fully funded varsity squads that have fulltime coaching staffs and all their equipment paid for, and our athletes are paying money out of pocket to participate, and it's impressive," Federici said. "But because we're a club, even if we went to Dad Vails and won, we wouldn't be allowed to participate in the IRA, so we wouldn't be allowed to really compete for the national championship."

In 2010, the team won the men's point trophy at the Dad Vail regatta for the third year in a row. The regatta is the largest intercollegiate rowing championship in the United States.

Varsity lightweight Patrick Cleveland transferred to the university from Marietta College where he was a member of Marietta's varsity-funded crew team. Cleveland is the second person in the past two years to transfer from a varsity-funded team to the Delaware's club program.

"It's one of the most competitive programs in the country, we're ranked 7th and that's just for the lightweight teams, and that's including varsity teams," Cleveland said.

For Cleveland, transitioning from a fully-funded varsity program to a club sport was difficult, specifically financially, since club members must pay to be on the team. Yet, he says that being part of a club program only increases his drive for the sport.

"Personally, I think there's more motivation to do well, to do better, when we beat teams like Columbia and Penn," Cleveland said. "They have coaches that are making tens of thousands of dollars a year and we have a coach who basically volunteers and we beat them; it's something to be proud of."

Cleveland says that being part of the team and the sport of rowing drives each member to do as well as they do.

"I just think the guys are just dedicated, they want to do well, that they have the drive to do well, and our coach, he pushes us to do well. He motivates us, and he does a good job at it," Cleveland said. "I hate mornings, and I hate waking up, so if I'm doing this every day, or six days out of the week, I'm going to want something out of it."