21 April 2020

By Thomas E. Weil

Rowing qua rowing is to most HTBS Types the act of attempting to achieve symphony in motion in a competitive context. But even that core act takes place within a smorgasbord of other activities. This, another in HTBS’s Dry Season Bottom-of-the-Barrel Series, is the second in a mini-series illustrating some of those other elements of rowing, as depicted by several decades of randomly collected news photos, images that demonstrate the insatiable appetite of the popular press at a time when journalism was interested not just in the act of rowing itself, but also in the bits and pieces that make up the greater tapestry of the sport.

“In the tank” is a slang term referring to prolonged poor performance. This would not, however, reflect the hopes of those rowing coaches who are lucky enough to have rowing tanks available for their crews to practice in when conditions preclude being able to get out on the water. Wikipedia describes a rowing tank as “an indoor facility which attempts to mimic the conditions rowers face on open water [note: not really].  … Rowing tanks are primarily used for off-season rowing, muscle specific conditioning and technique training, or simply when bad weather does not allow for open water training. A tank allows basic technique to be taught to newcomers to the sport in a safe environment, and enables coaches to work on the technique of more experienced oarsmen.”

Just as with the training barges addressed in TOPOR I, rowing tanks appear to have inspired no history of their own. The earliest mentions I have found are references to Yale’s construction of an indoor rowing tank in the late 1880s, which quickly led to the installation of a tank by Harvard. Tanks were conceived and built with a variety of designs over the years. As depicted above, the advanced tank was purpose made, with seats and rowlocks built onto a large concrete platform, with powerful pumps that sending water past the rowing stations at speeds that could be adjusted to simulate the different feels of the water when rowing. But as seen in the following photographs, most rowing tanks did not meet that level of sophistication…
Some early tanks, as in this image of indoor rowing at the Naval Academy in 1927, were cobbled together with impressive ingenuity. The midshipmen here sit in a form that approximates the body of a racing shell which has been placed in a swimming pool and is restrained by great cables from surging back and forth or from side to side as the oarsmen take their strokes.

The caption notwithstanding , the image captures not the crew, but Columbia coach Richard Glendon carefully watching his charges at work.  Whether the megaphone is actually needed in the confines of the pool area is not clear, but it would be hard to miss any directions issuing from its mouth.

If the swim team wanted their pool back, a crew (like these Columbia oarsmen in January of 1934) might construct an outdoor jerry-rigged rowing tank, putting the “shell” within a compartment allowing space for coaches to closely observe and provide on-the-spot guidance, while dividers in the water on the port and starboard sides, aided by the circular corners of the structure, allowed the current being pushed sternwards by the oars to circulate back towards the bow.

When Hubbard Hall was constructed as the Naval Academy’s boathouse in 1930, it was so situated on the bank of College Creek near the Severn River that a portion of the structure was built out over the water. The lowest floor of the east wing of the building was a rowing tank that effectively sat in College Creek, with water (as well as oyster larvae) flowing into the tank through grates built into the foundation walls (as seen here on the far wall, starboard side). And the Naval Academy swim team had no interest in using that pool …

So, by 1937, the Columbia oarsmen had at last acquired their own indoor tank, where they took on the challenge of rowing while lying down – but that is a subject reserved for the next piece – TOPOR III – in this series…

If one witnesses nine Olympic gold medalists hard at it, there must presumably be something good to be said for rowing in the tanks …