GETTING PHYSICAL ON THE
WATER
BY ANDREW PETKOFSKY
MATHEWS--The racing shells glide over the glassy water of the East River
with a delicacy that looks effortless.
But the grace on display to anyone watching from the shore is something
much more complex and punishing to the 15 teenagers who have been pulling oars
for nearly two hours by 8 a.m. on a recent day.
Bridge is a dark-haired, slender young woman who does not appear particularly muscular. She seems as unlikely to be a rowing champion as her school, a rural outpost with fewer than 500 students, seems unlikely to be a power in the world of high school rowing. But Mathews is a rowing powerhouse, its crews regularly winning gold medals against much larger schools in regattas as far away as Canada and Philadelphia. And Bridge rows in the "stroke," or sternmost position, on a Mathews four-woman boat that has won repeated first-place victories. While the rowers' high rankings don't win much respect from Mathews students more tuned in to mainstream sports such as football and baseball, according to Bridge and her teammates, they do attract attention at big events such as the Stotesbury Cup Regatta in Philadelphia that draws nearly 5,000 rowers from 140 high schools across the United States and Canada.
Her face still gleaming with sweat from the morning workout, Bridge tugs at a corner of her racing jersey, a slightly faded, royal blue tank top slashed by two diagonal gold stripes. "People are scared of this jersey," she said matter-of-factly. . . .
In what may be one secret of Mathews High's achievements in the world of competitive rowing, a core of the team continues training through the summer under the banner of the Mobjack Rowing Association.
Tim Ulsaker, the Mathews auto-mechanics teacher who started the rowing team in 1991 and the association team a few years later, said he set the summer schedule because everyone needed a break. Also, rowers' job and vacation schedules this year did not promise a top-notch racing crew that would be available for enough of the summer racing schedule. But as soon as Ulsaker arrives, each athlete climbs onto one of the 25 stationary rowing machines lined up in the boathouse for 10 minutes of warm-up to the pulse of Latin music from a boom box. Then they head out to the floating dock to launch a variety of racing shells, some set up for sculling, with each crew member pulling two oars, and others set up for "sweep" rowing, with each crew member pulling a single oar with both hands. The common denominators among the one-, two- and four-person boats are
their lightweight construction, narrow width barely wider than a rower's hips,
and the sliding seats and footrests that enable rowers to use every part of
their body for power. On the water, Ulsaker steers an aluminum johnboat alongside the shells, calling out pointers and corrections through a bullhorn. Through the still windless early morning, the shells glide surprisingly fast by a cruising sailboat anchored out for the night, and between shores lined mostly with estatelike manicured grounds. The rowers, though, are focused on their efforts, moving with graceful force, starting to sweat. There's a lot of complexity to rowing, involving the height of hands and oar blades in and out of the water, the sequence of efforts with arms, legs and back, and the coordination of each rower's movements with those of other crew members. And that doesn't even touch on specialized skills such as the series of furious strokes involved in a racing start. "You have to get most of the rowing technique into the subconscious," Ulsaker said later. "There's probably a thousand movements that you have to do." . . .
"He knows how to row. He knows what to do," said Charlie Ober, a 16-year-old rising junior at Mathews who has been on the team for two years. "But mostly he just drives us past where we think we can go." If you ask Ulsaker, he'll give more credit to the quality of the young people who come out for his team. He said they're tough, smart athletes who work hard enough and learn enough to regularly out-perform rowers from large schools in Northern Virginia that can pick their teams from thousands of students. But Ulsaker is the heart and soul of the Mathews team. After learning to row on an excellent high school team in Northern Virginia, he served in the Navy, earned an associate degree in automotive technology at a community college and went on for a bachelor's degree in industrial education at Virginia Tech. Now 51, Ulsaker came to teach at Mathews in 1980. Living in a county on water, he started thinking about rowing and received permission to start the team. Although the school pays a portion of the team's expenses, Ulsaker has cultivated a group of local philanthropists to help support an expensive undertaking that involved what he estimates to be $300,000 worth of equipment and facilities, and travel budgets that can rise to more than $7,000 for a team trip to a regatta in Canada. He was also active in organizing a land conservancy that purchased the Williams Wharf facility. Those efforts have brought Ulsaker respect in the world of competitive rowing, and they've created an outsized reputation for the Mathews team. Alumni have gone on to row for Ivy League schools and the U.S. Naval Academy. "I'm not sure I know of any other programs that you could compare to Mathews. I'm not sure there are any others," said Clete Graham, commodore of the Schuylkill Navy in Philadelphia and director of the Stotesbury Cup Regatta. "They routinely send teams up here that kick butt."
For Mathews rowers, the spring racing season runs from March through May. Practices run five days a week after school from about 3:15 p.m. to as late as 7:45. On most Saturdays, team members climb on a bus at 4:30 a.m. and drive three hours to races at Occoquan in Prince William County. They get home by 8 or 9 p.m. Then there are out-of-town trips each season to Philadelphia, New Jersey and Canada. "It requires a great deal of giving up all of your time," said Chelsea Shomaker, a 15-year-old rising sophomore and member of the girls junior four team that won gold at Stotesbury. "All of your time." Teammate Allie Bridge smiles and nods. "It's great," she said. Why is that? Whittney Henry, a 17-year-old rising senior who is also a member of the girls junior four team, said the answer is on the wall of her bedroom: "Twenty-some medals." Gale Meagher, the mother of Charlie Ober and his twin brother and teammate Will Ober, said rowing for Mathews seems from her vantage to be the hardest sport possible, and at the same time completely addictive.
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At this year's Stotesbury Cup in May, Mathews won two
championships, in the
boys senior four competition and girls junior four, whose crew included
Bridge.
The school year has long been over, and the spring racing season is now a
memory. But rowers from the Mathews team, along with students from other
rowing high schools including Gloucester High and the private Christchurch
School, arrive before 6 a.m. at a dilapidated boathouse at Williams Wharf just
south of Mathews Courthouse.
In most summers, the association team has worked out hard every morning and
traveled from Florida to Canada for races, but this summer is being devoted to
an easier schedule of no competition and three-times-a-week, 6-to-9 morning
workouts focusing on conditioning and technique.
If you ask a Mathews rower what makes the team so good, the answer
inevitably boils down to one word: Ulsaker.
"When you see them come home with bloody blisters on their hands and
they turn around and go the next day and grab those oars," Meagher said,
"you know they love it."