For reasons which were set forth at the commencement of the chapter on scientific oarsmanship, the very best oar may fail to see his own faults. For this reason, in dealing with the methods for detecting and curing faults, it seems more to the point to write as addressing the tutor rather than the pupil. The latter will improve faster under any adequate verbal instruction than by perusing pages of bookwork upon the science of oarsmanship.

A coach may often know much more than he can himself perform; he may be with his own muscles but a mediocre exponent of his art, and yet be towards the top of the tree as regards knowledge and power of instruction.

A coach, like his pupils, often becomes too ‘mechanical’; he sees some salient fault in his crew, he sets himself to eradicate it, and meanwhile it is possible that he may overlook some other great fault which is gradually developing itself among one or more of the men. And yet if he were asked to coach some other crew for the day, in which crew this same fault existed, he would be almost certain to note it, and to set to work to cure it.

For this reason, although it does not do to have too many mentors at work from day to day upon one crew, nevertheless the best of coaches may often gain a hint by taking some one else into his counsels for an hour or two, and by comparing notes.

We have said that it is not absolutely necessary that a good coach should always be in his own person a finished oarsman; but if he is all the better, and for one very important reason. More than half the faults which oarsmen contract are to be traced in the first instance to some irregularity in the machinery with which they are working. That irregularity may be of two sorts, direct or indirect—direct when the boat, oar, rowlock, or stretcher is improperly constructed, so that an oarsman cannot work fairly and squarely; indirect when some other oarsman is perpetrating some fault which puts others out of gear.

If a coach is a good oarsman on his own account (by ‘good’ we mean scientific rather than merely powerful), he can and should test and try or inspect the seat and oar of each man whom he coaches, especially if he finds a man painstaking and yet unable to cure some special fault. Boatbuilders are very careless in laying out work. A rowlock may be too high or too low; it may rake one way or other, and so spoil the plane of the oar in the water. An oar may be hog-backed (or sprung), or too long in loom, or too short; the straps of a stretcher may be fixed too high, so as to grip only the tip of a great-toe, and the place for the feet may not be straight to the seat, or a rowlock may be too narrow, and so may jam the oar when forward.

These are samples of mechanical discomfort which may spoil any man’s rowing, and against which it may be difficult for the most painstaking pupil to contend successfully. If the coach is good in practice as well as in theory of oarsmanship, he can materially simplify his own labours and those of his pupils by inspecting and trying the ‘work’ of each man in turn.

He should bear in mind that if a young oar is thrown out of shape in his early career by bad mechanical appliances, the faults of shape often cling to him unconsciously later on, even when he is at last furnished with proper tools. If a child were taught to walk with one boot an inch thicker in the sole than the other, the uneven gait thereby produced might cling to him long after he had been properly shod.

Young oarsmen in a club are too often relegated to practise in cast-off boats with cast-off oars, none of which are really fit for use. Nothing does more to spoil the standard of junior oarsmanship in a club than neglect of this nature.

Having ascertained that all his pupils are properly equipped and are properly seated, fair and square to stretchers suitable for the length of leg of each, the next care of a coach should be to endeavour to trace the cause of each fault which he may detect. This is more difficult than to see that a fault exists. At the same time, if the coach cannot trace the cause, it is hardly reasonable to expect the pupil to do so. So many varied causes may produce some one generic fault that it may drive a pupil from one error to another to tell him nothing more than that he is doing something wrong without at the same time explaining to him how and why he is at fault.

For instance, suppose a man gets late into the water. This lateness may arise from a variety of causes, for example:

1. He may be hanging with arms or body, or both, when he has finished the stroke, and so he may be late in starting to go forward; or

2. He may be correct until he has attained his forward reach, and then, may be, he hangs before dropping his oar into the water; or

3. He may begin to drop his oar at the right time, but to do so in a ‘clipping’ manner, not dropping the oar perpendicularly, but bringing it for some distance back in the air before it touches the water.

Now to tell a batch of men—all late, and all late from different causes as above—simply that each one is ‘late’ does little good. The cure which will set the one right will only vary, or even exaggerate, the mischief with the others.

Hence a coach should, before he animadverts upon a fault, of which he observes the effect, watch carefully until he detects the exact cause, and then seek to eradicate it.

Another sample of cause and effect in faults may be cited for illustration. Suppose a man holds his oar in his fist instead of his fingers. The effect of this probably will be a want of accuracy in ‘governing’ the blade. He may thereby row too deep; also only half feather; also find a difficulty in bending his wrists laterally, and therefore fail to bring his elbows neatly past his sides. The consequent further effect may well be that he dog’s-ears his elbows and gets a cramped finish. This will tend to make his hands come slow off the chest for the recovery; and this again may tend to make his body heavy on the return swing.

Here is a pretty, and quite possible, concatenation of faults all bearing on each other in sequence, more or less. To be scolded for each such fault in turn may well bewilder a pupil. He will be taken aback at the plurality of defects which he is told to cure. But if the coach should spot the faulty grip, and cure that by some careful coaching in a tub-gig, he may in a few days find the other faults gradually melt away when the one primary awkwardness has been eradicated.

These two illustrations of faults and their origins by no means exhaust the category of errors which a coach has to detect and to cure.

Sundry other common faults may be specified, and the best mode of dealing with them by coaches supplied.

Over-reach of shoulders.—This weakens the catch of the water, and also tends to cripple the finish when the time comes to row the oar home. The shoulders should be braced well back. The extra inch or less of forward reach which the over-reach obtains is not worth having at the cost of weakening the catch and cramping the finish. The fault is best cured by gig-coaching and by demonstrating in person the correct and the wrong poses of the shoulders.

Meeting the oar.—This may come from more than one cause. If the legs leave off supporting the body before the oar-handle comes to the chest, the body droops to the strain from want of due support; or if the oarsman tries to row the stroke home with arms only, ceasing the swing back; and still more, if he tries to finish with biceps instead of by shoulder muscles, he is not unlikely to row deep, because he feels the strain of rowing the oar home in time, with less power behind it than that employed by others in the boat. He finds the oar come home easier if it is slightly deflected, and so unconsciously he begins to row rather deep (or light) at the finish, in order to get his oar home at the right instant.

Swing.—faults of may be various. There may be a hang, or conversely a hurry, in the swing; and, as shown above, the causes of these errors in swing may often be beneath the surface, and be connected with faulty hold of an oar, or a loose or badly placed strap, or a stretcher of wrong length, or from faulty finish of the preceding stroke. Lateness in swing may arise per se, and so may a ‘bucket,’ but as often as not they are linked with other faults, which have to be corrected at least simultaneously, and often antecedently.

Screwing either arises from mechanical fault at the moment or from former habits of rowing under difficulties occasionally with bad appliances. If a man sits square, with correct oar, rowlock, and stretcher, he does not naturally screw. If the habit seems to have grown upon him, a change of side will often do more than anything else to cure him. He is screwing because he is working his limbs and loins unevenly; hence the obvious policy of making him change the side on which he puts the greater pressure.Feather under water.—The fault is one of the most common, the remedy simple. The pupil should be shown the difference between turning the oar-handle before he drops it (as he is doing) and of dropping it before he turns it as he ought to do; and it should be impressed upon him that the root of the thumb, and not his knuckles, should touch his chest when the oar comes home, and should be done before, and not after, he has dropped his handle to elevate the blade from the water.

If a crew feather much under water, it is a good plan to seat them in a row on a bench, and give each man a stick to handle as an oar. Then make them very slowly follow the actions of the coach, or a fugleman. 1. Hands up to the chest, root of thumb touching chest. 2. Drop the hands. 3. Turn them (as for feather) sharply. 4. Shoot them out, &c.

Having got them to perform each motion slowly and distinctly, then gradually accelerate the actions, until they are done as an entirety, with rapidity and in proper consecution. The desideratum is to ensure motion, No. 3 being performed in its due order, and not before No. 2.

Five minutes’ drill of this sort daily before the rowing, for a week or two, will do much to cure feather under water even with hardened sinners.

Swing across the boat.—This is an insidious fault. The oarsman sits square, while his oar-handle moves in an arc of a circle. He has an instinctive tendency to endeavour to keep his chest square to his oar during the revolution of the latter. A No. 7 who has to take time from the stroke by the side of him is more prone than others to fall into this fault. The answer is, let the arms follow the action of the oar, and give way to it, and endeavour to keep the body straight and square. Keep the head well away from the oar, and its bias will tend to balance the swing.

Bending the arms prematurely is a common fault. Sometimes even high-class oars fall into it after a time. Tiros are prone to it, because they at first instinctively endeavour to work with arms rather than with body. Older oars adopt the trick in the endeavour to catch the water sharply at the beginning. Of course they lose power by doing so; but they do not realise their loss, because, feeling a greater strain on their arms, they imagine that they must therefore be doing more work.

Lessons in a tub-gig are the best remedies for this fault.

‘Paddling’ is an art which is of much importance in order to bring a crew to perfection, and at the same time it is too often done in a slovenly manner compared with hard rowing.

The writer admits that his own views as to how paddling should be performed differ somewhat from those of sundry good judges and successful coaches. Some of these are of opinion that paddling should consist of rowing gently, comparatively speaking, with less force and catch at the beginning of the stroke and with less reach than when rowing hard, but with blade always covered to regulation depth. When the order is given to ‘Row,’ then the full length should be attained and the full ‘catch’ administered.

The writer’s own version of paddling differs as follows. He is of opinion that the difference between paddling and rowing should be produced by working with a ‘light’—only partially covered—blade when paddling. The effect of this is to ease the whole work of the stroke; but at the same time the swing, reach, and catch should be just the same as if the blade were covered. Then, when the order comes to ‘Row,’ all the oarsman has to do is so to govern his blade that he now immerses the whole of it, and at the same time to increase his force to the amount necessary to row the stroke of the full blade throughout the required time.

Those good judges who differ from him as aforesaid base their objections to his method chiefly on the ground that it requires rather a higher standard of watermanship to enable an oarsman so to govern his blade that he can immerse it more or less at will, and yet maintain the same outward action of body, only with more or less force employed, according to amount of blade immersed.

The writer admits that his process does entail the acquisition of a somewhat higher standard of watermanship than the other system. But he is none the less of opinion that this admission should not be accepted as a ground for teaching the other style.

In the first place, it would seem to him better to try to raise the standard of watermanship to the system than to lower the system to meet the requirements of inferior skill. In the second, there seems to be even greater drawbacks to the system preferred by his friends who differ from him. For instance, under the alternative system the oarsman is taught to alter his style of body when paddling, but to maintain a uniform depth of blade. He is taught to apply less sharpness of catch, and less reach forward. To do so may tend to take the edge off catch, and to shorten reach, when hard rowing has to be recommenced.

It is plain that paddling cannot be all round the same as rowing; there must be an alternative prescribed. The writer says, in effect: ‘Alter only the blade (and so the amount of force required), and maintain outward action of body as before.’

Those who take the other view say, in effect: ‘Maintain the same blade, and alter the action of the body.’

It must be admitted that those who differ from the writer are entitled, from their own performances as oarsmen and coaches, to every possible respect; and the writer, while failing to agree with them, hesitates to assert that for that reason he must be right and they wrong.

One further reason in favour of paddling with a light blade may be added. When an oarsman is exhausted in a race, it is of supreme importance that, though unable to do his full share of work, he should not mar the swing and style of the rest. Now if such an oarsman, when nature fails him, can row lighter and so ease his toil, he can maintain swing and style with the rest. But if, on the other hand, he keeps his blade covered to the full, and seeks relief by rowing shorter and with less dash, he alters his style and tends to spoil the uniformity of the crew.

Watermanship is a quality which can hardly be coached; it may, therefore, seem out of place to deal with it under the head of coaching. Yet in one sense it pertains to coaching, because a mentor takes into calculation the capacity of an oarsman for exercising watermanship when making a selection of a crew.

Watermanship, as a technical term, may be said to consist in adapting oneself to circumstances and exigencies during the progress of a boat. A good waterman keeps time with facility, a bad one only after much painstaking—if at all. A good waterman adapts himself to every roll of the boat, sits tight to his seat, anticipates an incipient roll, and rights the craft so far as he can by altering his centre of gravity while yet plying his oar. A bad waterman is more or less helpless when a boat is off its keel, or when he encounters rough water. So long as the boat is level, he may be able to do even more work than the good waterman, but when the boat rolls he cannot help himself, still less can he right the ship and so help others to work, as can the good waterman.

Good watermen can jump into a racing boat and sit her off-hand; bad watermen will be unsteady in a keelless boat even after days of practice.

One or two good watermen are the making of a crew, especially when time is short for practice. They will raise the standard of rowing of all their colleagues, simply by keeping the balance of the boat. Sculling and pair-oar practice tend to teach watermanship. They induce a man to make use of his own back and beam in order to keep the boat on an even keel. We do not for this reason say that every tiro should be put to take lessons of watermanship in sculling-boats and light pairs: far from it. He will be likely in such craft to contract feather under water, and possibly screwing, in the efforts to obtain work on an even keel, after his own uneven action has conduced to rolling.

University men produce far fewer good watermen than the tideway clubs, and with good reason. The career on the river at Oxford or Cambridge is brief, and many a man goes out of residence while he is only on the threshold of aquatic science, both in practice and theory; although, on account of his big frame, he may have been taught artificially to ply an oar, and with good effect, in a practised eight. Watermanship, like skating, cannot be acquired in a day, and the younger a man takes to aquatics the more likely is he to acquire it. There is hardly a bad waterman to be seen as a rule in a grand challenge crew of London R.C. or Thames R.C. men. Among University oars, watermanship is oftenest found in those who have rowed as schoolboys.

To coaches generally of the present and of future generations we may say that there is nothing like having a tenacity of purpose, and declining to listen to the shoals of excuses which pupils are inclined to propound in order to explain their shortcomings. There should be no such thing as ‘I can’t’ from a pupil. On the other hand, the coach should do his best to render the excuse untenable by ensuring proper ‘work’ at each thwart. A coach should not be carried away by every whisper of criticism by outsiders; and yet at the same time he should realise as said at the beginning of this chapter, that, however able he may be, he has a natural tendency to become blind to faults which are being daily perpetrated under his nose—the more so if he has been specially of late devoting his attention to some different class of fault in his men. For this reason he should not decline to listen to suggestions from mentors who otherwise may be his inferiors in the art, and to give them all attention before he decides how to deal with them.

In dealing with the selection of men for a crew he has to consider various points. He has to calculate for what seats such and such an oarsman will be available, as regards weight and capacity generally for the seat. He has to bear in mind the date of the race for which he is preparing his men; many an oarsman may be admittedly unfit for a seat if the race were rowed to-morrow, and yet he may show promise of being fit for it six months hence. A may be better than B to-day; but A may be an old stager hardened in certain faults, and of whom no hope can now be entertained that he will suddenly reform. B may be as green as a gooseberry, and yet the recollection of what he was two or three weeks ago, compared to what he is now, may warrant the assumption that by the day of the race, some time hence, B will have become the better man of the two.

A coach who takes a crew in hand halfway through their preparation should be prepared to hear evidence as to what was the standard of merit of certain men some time back, compared with their present form; otherwise he may delude himself as to the relative merits and prospects of the material which he has to mould into shape.

Just as orators are said to learn at the expense of their audience, so coaches do undoubtedly learn much at the expense of the crews which they manage. Many a coach will agree that he has often felt in later years that, if he had his time over again with this or that oarsman or crew, he would now form a different judgment from what he formerly did.

In concluding this chapter we cannot do better than extract from Dr. Warre’s treatise on Athletics certain aphorisms for the benefit of coaches, which he has tersely compiled under the head of ‘Notes on Coaching’: