Stephanie Snyder had one goal for the Cal Poly Rowing Club at the Western Intercollegiate Rowing Association (WIRA) Championships: to avoid embarrassing themselves.
“I was honestly going into it wanting to just have a clean race,” Snyder said, who is an English junior and the head coach of the women’s team. “If we can avoid getting last, I’ll be happy.”
Most teams normally end their season at the WIRA Championships. However, due to the team’s limited funding, this was the only race the club was able to attend.
The club exceeded Snyder’s expectations.
During the two-day race on April 27 to 28 in Sacramento, Cal Poly Rowing Club’s Men’s A boat jumped from fifth in their Saturday race to finishing first overall in their Sunday race.
The Women’s A boat went from fourth place on Saturday to win the whole race on Sunday, while the B boat went from fifth place on Saturday to fourth place on Sunday.
Both teams faced off against programs like Oregon, Washington and UC Santa Barbara.
Humble beginnings
Cal Poly Rowing Club was founded in November 2022 and began practicing in January 2023, despite not having a boat until after spring break of 2023.
At first, the team could only practice on land. They did team runs and used the rowing machine at the Cal Poly Recreation Center.
Finally, the team purchased a single boat, which was all they needed given the club had fewer than 10 members.
The club received assistance from the San Luis Obispo Rowing Club located at Santa Margarita Lake, which helped them buy three boats and provide a practice site along with boat storage and repair facilities.
“Since then the process of [the club has] just grown,” junior environmental management and protection major and club publicity chair Caroline Dailey said. “People have heard about it through posters and word of mouth.”
Currently, the club doesn’t hold pre-season tryouts. Prospective members must fill out an interest form on the club’s website to join.
However, with the number of members more than tripling in size last year from 12 to 45, the shift towards tryouts is becoming more and more likely.
A tight-knit community
Those who joined last year almost instantly found themselves on a club team with an incredibly tight community. In fact, the strong community is what drew some of the club’s members back into the sport despite the team not existing when they first arrived at Cal Poly.
“I did rowing in middle school and didn’t love rowing at first, but I loved the community,” accounting junior and coach of the men’s team Noah Cours said. “I was never the biggest fan of actually doing it, but the people involved are definitely the best part, and that’s what made me stay.”
Every aspect is of the club is student-run, from travel arrangements to uniform designs to boat repairs. According to Dailey, doing everything themselves is more than worth it.
“It’s very rewarding to see,” Dailey said. “We built this thing together, and you know that all the other people who’ve also been working on this for the last year are in the same boat.”
According to Snyder, her workload as a coach is sometimes greater than of a student.
“It’s crazy because we don’t get paid to do this,” Snyder said. “We’re just students. But it really is the time commitment and workload of a full-time job.
According to Snyder, she spends at least five hours a day on various aspects of her coaching role, whether at the club’s morning practices or when she is off the water meeting with athletes, reviewing videos or creating workouts.
According to both coaches, though, the biggest challenge of the job is managing the coach-athlete relationships they have with the rowers.
“I’m friends with everyone on the team,” Cours said. “So trying to find that boundary of at this time we’re coaches versus at this time, we’re friends, can be a difficult thing to get through.”
While they do their best to be understanding, Cours and Snyder know what ultimately matters is how the team performs.
That mindset was no different this past season, despite the fact that it consisted of just one event.
“I definitely would hand it 100% to the athletes,” Cours said. “With the men’s team we’ve been very fortunate to have a group of guys that seem to love the sport and really love each other.”
While Snyder does share the same beliefs as her fellow coach, she also realizes just how quick the turnaround was between the club’s November race and WIRAs.
“We have big plans for the future,” Snyder said. “We’re happy with how this has turned out. I cannot speak enough about how proud I am of where we were able to take the team in just [those] four months.”
For more information on Cal Poly Rowing Club, visit their Instagram account @cprowing.