Rowing on Waramaug
by Christine Adams Beckett
A group of four individuals row together several times a week during the warmer months on Lake Waramaug. They take to their sculls early in the morning, when the surface of the lake is still like a pane of glass, with mists rising from the warmer waters to the cooler air. They are a private group of people and yet socially minded, greeting several other rowers each morning. A few can boast an Olympic pedigree. Together in love of the cerebral sport, these athletes scull across the surface, graceful as aquatic birds, yet exerting great effort unbeknownst to appreciative onlookers. One describes the experience as a privilege, zen-like, quiet and reflective. With a limited line of sight, propelling his boat backwards with even strokes, reflection is a natural byproduct, working in the present yet blind to what is ahead.
Presently, the Lake is home to more than just recreational rowers and retired Olympians. The Gunnery School crews are largely seen as a signal of the arrival of Spring, described by one West Shore resident as appearing as an army of ants across the lake, effortlessly carrying what appears to be sleek blades of long grass, their Pocock and Vespoli sculls, from the Beebe Boathouse adjacent to the Washington Club beach. Ice still dominates all basins of our Lake, but as soon as the water is clear, safe and passable, the boys and girls of The Gunnery will displace a modest, chilly wake with their 24" wide hulls in preparation for Spring competition, including the eagerly anticipated Founders' Day Regatta, which has been held on Waramaug since 1959.
Yet our Lake's sculling and rowing history extends further back in Waramaug's past than 1959. Presumably, the Wyantenock people wielded oars to propel their canoes, for more practical purposes: transportation and fishing. But sculling for sport was first regarded by columnist Pen Dragon. In a June, 1875 edition of the Litchfield Enquirer, he reported "The Oars Club, composed of the elite of Bridgeport's young men quartered at the Cheere Point House, held a regatta last Thursday. The Club hired the steamer Flirt for the day and carried many loads of pleasure seekers. Among the goodly crowd were the judges Charles E. Beeman and George F. Brown, with members of the Oars Club and your worthy correspondent... Waramaug has not been the scene of such festivity for many a day, and the occasion will be remembered by the assembled multitude as a choice moment of pleasant bygones." (From A History of Lake Waramaug, by Mary Harwood, The Lake Waramaug Association, c 1996). At that time, the course was a mile and three quarters long, extending from what is now the Lake Waramaug Country Club beach, to the East Shore near Pinnacle Valley, known as the New Preston Basin.
Just four short years after our locally-flavored competition, Waramaug was discovered by The New York Crew, which according to Pen Dragon, was using the lake as training waters for the International Professional Regatta on one of the more famous courses on the East Coast, the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania. A more formal history, however, can be drawn from 1947, when Gunnery School football coach Rod Beebe, for whom the boathouse adjacent to the Washington Club beach gets its name, began a rowing program for his young, male scholar athletes.
Beebe proceeded to develop a powerhouse program that would produce a crew of Olympic caliber. "In 1956, for example, the Gunnery's varsity crew rowed in the Olympic trials at Lake Onondaga, New York, and made it to the semi-finals. Unfortunately, they lost in the finals to Princeton and Cornell." (Harwood, ibid). In 1959, with the generous support of Katherine Conroy, Coach Beebe began the annual Founders' Day Regatta on Lake Waramaug, a tradition that continues, held this year on Sunday, May 3, 2015. This year's Founders' Day hosted 25 different scholastic teams and rowing clubs; the endeavor is a huge one, requiring more than 100 volunteers, many of them local residents. Since 1978, the same year girls were invited to participate, the Founders' Day races have taken place in the Kent basin, along the shore of the State Park. It is notable to include that women had competed in the sport for only six years at the time, making Waramaug one of the first locales of women's competition in American history.
Since 2000, the Connecticut Public Schools Regatta has been held on the same course, in cooperation with the Founders' Day organization. Shortly following the Founders' Day Regatta, May 17th of this year, thirteen crews throughout the State compete in ten events at the CPSRA Championships. Two trophies awarded at the races are named in honor of W. Hart Perry and Chris Combs, commemorating their tireless work: promoting rowing in the State.
The Kent and South Kent Schools also utilized Waramaug's excellent watercourses for practice and competition. Chris Combs, son of the Inn on Lake Waramaug's former proprietor Richard, remembers fondly being a filler for absent rowers at the request of then South Kent coach, Chuck Willing. The school used the Inn's beach as a launching site for practices from 1967, and soon thereafter recognized the Kent Basin as an ideal locale for the course, being protected from wind and more than 1500 meters in length, the high school regatta standard. Combs developed a life-long love of the sport, later rowing for Washington College in Maryland, and currently serves as a Director of the Eastern Association of Women's Rowing Colleges (EAWRC).
Hart Perry, who was head coach of the Kent School crew, utilized Waramaug for practices as well. He said that he "always thought that [Waramaug] would make a great competitive course. This was proved in 1971, when the National Junior Regatta was first held at the Lake with junior teams from all over the country competing. [He] then put in a bid for the Olympic Trials Regatta." Perry's bid was accepted, and the US Olympic small boat rowing trials for qualification in the 1972 Munich games were held on Lake Waramaug. At this time, only men competed nation-wide, while the sport for women was still in its developing stages. Jay Combs, another of Richard's sons raised at the Inn, recalls a competitor arriving in a Volkswagon beetle with a scull strapped to the roof, which he drove all the way from Los Angeles to try to qualify. Jay was remorseful never to have learned if he had.
Jay also recalls several families housing competitors in August of 1972, including the Weidlich family. Kirby Mullen, daughter of the late Peter Mullen, former Association president, remembers selling refreshments to spectators at stands set up along the State Park.
Mark Sptiz took top medal honors at the Munich games in swimming that year, earning seven golds and breaking as many world records, but the men's rowing team also had a very respectable showing. Of the athletes who tried at Waramaug that summer, Jim Dietz was the most successful, making it to the finals and placing fifth overall. The American eight-man shell in the 2000 meter sweeps ("sweeps" refer to rowers who use a single oar rather than two), consisting mostly of Harvard and Union Boat Club of Boston men, won the pre-Olympic regatta, setting a course record. In the finals, where tickets went for more than $100 apiece reflecting Europe's love for rowing, the Americans won a silver behind New Zealand, and just eking by the East German team by six one-hundredths of a second.
South Kent's Chuck Willing is also known for bringing the Women's Eastern Sprints to Waramaug in 1979, as mentioned, a groundbreaking time for women in the Sport. Willing was responsible for building the course, which consisted of an impressive laundry list of materials. "The 680 acre lake in New Preston had a protected water basin that was excellent for racing. The EAWRC and its members also found the Lake Waramaug community to be very supportive of the event. A trio of private high schools were involved (Kent, South Kent and Gunnery), especially South Kent School, which set up the buoyed course, a job that required seven miles of cable and 1500 buoys." (From "The First Strokes," by, Erica Hurtt, Ivy League Public Information Assistant).
Members of our community housed women competitors in their homes, both for overnight stays and rest stops for the Brown crew, in the case of the New Preston based Combs family, or as a "respite site" for the Princeton Crew, who sought sustenance and rest at the West Shore home of Grenville and Sally Paynter. Oarswomen were shuttled via bus between their Danbury hotels, the race site at Sutters' Cove and the Paynters' stately summer home. The well-bonded crew swept the event in 1996, much to the delight of their hosts.
The sprints were held in the Kent basin until 2000, at which time Willing had retired, the race length at the women's collegiate level increased to 2000 meters, and Title IX involved the NCAA in regulation of competition. The Kent basin, measured in at 1950 meters in the 6th lane, and therefore 50 meters short. It remains an ideal locale for high school competition, however, which is 1500 meters.
The EAWRC moved to a course in Camden, New Jersey in 2001, on the Cooper River within site of Philadelphia, offering a much less bucolic scene for rowers, but the advantages of a more urban setting, including accommodations within minutes of the course. According to a regular Waramaug rower and former Sprints spectator, Harvard coach Harry Parker expressed great remorse to leave our "special, perfect course."
For those new to the sport of rowing, the propulsion of the boat appears to be a graceful glide over the water, powered effortlessly by able-bodied young men and women. Yet in actuality, the athletic feat is unparalleled in mechanics, teamwork, and athletic and intellectual abilities. George Yeoman Pocock, the legendary scull builder, said "To see a winning crew in action is to witness a perfect harmony in which everything is right... That is the formula for endurance and success: rowing with the heart and head as well as physical strength." Most impressive is the Herculean task the human body must perform in order to compete at rowing's highest echelons.
"When you row, the major muscles in your arms, legs and back — particularly the quadriceps, triceps, biceps, deltoids, latissimus dorsi, abdominals, hamstrings and gluteal muscles — do most of the grunt work, propelling the boat forward against the unrelenting resistance of water and wind. At the same time, scores of smaller muscles in the neck, wrist, hands and even feet continually fine-tune your efforts, holding the body in constant equipoise in order to maintain the exquisite balance necessary to keep a twenty-four inch-wide vessel — roughly the width of a man's waist — on an even keel. The result of all this muscular effort, on both the larger scale and the smaller, is that your body burns calories and consumes oxygen at a rate that is unmatched in almost any other human endeavor. Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand-meter race — the Olympic standard — takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes." (From The Boys in the Boat, Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by Daniel James Brown. Viking Penguin, 2013).
Those interviewed for this article speak with affection of so many other regular rowers that come to Waramaug to train: masters from New Milford's GMS rowing center, a gentleman who comes each August from England and spends almost every day of his American holiday rowing. Most are lakeside neighbors.
With the strength required — both physical, psychological and intellectual — many of Waramaug's rowers found the wherewithal to overcome other adversities. Pocock said that "it is hard to make the boat go as fast as you want to. The enemy, of course, is resistance of the water, as you have to displace the amount of water equal to the weight of men and equipment, but that very enemy is your friend. So is life: the very problems you must overcome also support you and make you stronger in overcoming them."
A resulting, inevitable camaraderie derives from Waramaug's rowing competitions, whether through formal or friendly competition. In oarsmen vernacular language, the synchronized rhythm achieved at peak, when the 8 men in a sweep are rowing in perfect time, is referred to as a "swing;" crews have been known to cry out in delight once it is achieved. The sport requires as much teamwork as any other quality, in order for a boat to move at the fastest possible speed. So it's no wonder that those coming together in love of the sport find similar qualities in each other, which naturally extend to other areas of their lives. Many of the rowers on Waramaug are also tireless volunteers for her preservation and protection, pulling their own weight — and then some — in the much more deliberate task of loving the waters upon which they scull.
For further reading, please see www.usrowing.org and www.row2k.com. Also, please note that The Gunnery School will host a summer camp for young people entering grades 7 through 11 focusing on teaching the fundamentals of rowing. All activities will take place at and around The Beebe Boathouse adjacent to the Washington Club beach.