Local Crew Steers Boat to the East : Trying to Beat the Shell Game

Eric Barge gave up his $30,000-a-year job. He left his home in Van Nuys. He told his girlfriend she didn’t come first in his life.

Barge, 24, now focuses solely on sliding an oar smoothly in and out of the water, on pushing faster across the bay in a thin, pointed boat called a racing shell and on moving in sync with three others.

Barge is a rower. His energy is now consumed by his training, which begins at 5 a.m. daily on Mission Bay. His mind is focused on one date, June 24, when the trials for the world rowing competition begin in Indianapolis.

The winner of the trials earns a spot in the world championships in Copenhagen in August.

If the San Diego crew loses in the trials, it will compete in the Pan American Games trials, also in Indianapolis.

“The sacrifices make you think twice,” said Barge, who quit work as a private investigator four months ago to train. “You better win to make it worthwhile.”

Barge thinks he can win. He and three other former San Diego State rowers--Josh Gruenberg, 22, Leon Pawinski, 27, and Toby Shipley, 23--have teammed to compete in the “four straight” lightweight class. In this class, all crew members must weigh less than 155 pounds and there is no coxswain (a crew member who steers the shell and calls out the rhythm of the rowers’ stroke). The San Diego crew believes it has one of the fastest shells in it class.

If the rowers are right, they have a chance to upset the balance of power in United States rowing.

“I have a romantic vision of us coming out from the West to prove something to the East Coast rowing establishment,” Gruenberg said. “It would be a major upset.”

The East Coast traditionally has been the center for U.S. rowing. Though such schools as University of Washington and California have produced collegiate national champions, Ivy League crews such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton have dominated collegiate rowing. Eastern rowing clubs have evolved into the training centers for national post-collegiate competitors.

Barge, Gruenberg and Pawinski had hopes of getting seats on national contending lightweight crews. They went to the national lightweight training center at the Vesper Boat Club on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River to train.

But they eventually returned to San Diego because, they say, they were disillusioned by the lack of support from what they characterize as a club mentality that excluded outsiders. Gruenberg said one coach told him he was wasting his time there.

Gruenberg said that many serious West Coast rowers join Eastern rowing clubs to train. In “The Amateurs,” a profile of four 1984 Olympic rowers by David Halberstam, the author sums up the East Coast bias: “It was all right to be from California, no one could really help that, but to continue to train there indicated that an oarsman was probably not entirely serious.” Gruenberg said the bias has not changed.

“When I decided to come back to California, it was, ‘So, I guess you’re not going to the nationals,’ ” Gruenberg said.

But he and his former college teammates decided they could win under the auspices of the San Diego Rowing Club. In early March, they began a rigorous training program under Chuck Datte, a former SDSU crew coach.

Datte, 39, coached San Diego State to winning seasons in 1985 and 1986 before leaving to work toward a Ph.D in physics and electronic engineering. But, for the last three months, he has been at the San Diego Rowing Club boathouse at 5 a.m.

“I’m confident that they will make either the Pan American Games or the world championships,” Datte said.

The crew is training for a 2,000-meter race. The average time in the straight four class is 6 minutes, 20 seconds.

Last month, the San Diego crew won the Southwest Regional Rowing Championships at Sacramento in a boat with coxswain in 6:53. It was then, Datte said, that they realized their goal was attainable.

“Before they said, ‘Yeah, let’s go for the worlds,’ but when they got their results they realized, ‘My God, it’s a reality,’ ” he said.

The United States Rowing Assn. has received 12 entries for the straight four lightweight trials. But the San Diego rowers are primarily concerned with four boats, two from the Vesper Boat Club in Philadelphia and two from the Boston area.

“We are keenly aware of who we’re going after,” Gruenberg said. “You can’t have any vague ideas about what you’re doing.”

Neither can you be short on will power. The physical demands of rowing require athletes to play mental games to push through pain, to make it through a race.

“By the time I get to the last 500 meters, I can go all out,” Gruenberg said. “I figure my body can take anything for a minute and a half. What you learn after the first year or two of rowing is that you aren’t going to die.”

Training in the early morning allows the crew to row on smooth water that has not been disturbed by powerboats and water skiers. After rowing for more than an hour, the crew works on synchronization drills.

“They have to get their motions working together,” Datte said. “They sit still on the water and run through taking their oars out then putting them back in the water. They go through the moves a billion times, sometimes two billion.”

Every afternoon they workout on land, running sprints to improve their strength and endurance.

Although the training schedule allows little time for other activities, Gruenberg and Pawinski continue to work for local businesses. Barge manages to put in a few hours occasionally for his former employer and Shipley has been working on his physics degree. But as the competition draws closer, time for anything but training and planning is rare.

“Easterners think we’re laid back and casual,” Gruenberg said. “But we’re actually working harder. That’s why we have a chance.”

If there is a disadvantage to training on the West Coast, it is the lack of high-caliber rowers to train against. There is no one to push the San Diego crew. Each morning the rowers crawl out of bed to race only against Datte’s stopwatch.

The lack of competition is particularly troublesome for a straight four crew. Race strategy involves awareness of the other boat and knowing when to sprint and when to hang back. But without a coxswain for communication, the straight four crew relies solely on its bowman, who steers the boat with his feet, which are connected to the rudder. Shipley, the bowman, and the others have had little chance to become accustomed to seeing a competitor creep into their peripheral vision.

“We’re a little worried about it,” Gruenberg admitted.

Another concern is lack of funding. There is no source of funding available for crews hoping to compete in national or international events. The local rowers estimate they must raise $11,000 in their quest to qualify for the world championships. The United States Rowing Assn. will pay for the qualifying team’s trip to Copenhagen.

Aside from lodging and travel, the San Diego crew also is faced with the cost of a new boat, which is about $6,000. The San Diego Rowing Club provided half the funds and the rest of the money is being raised by the rowers, who solicit local businesses for donations and sell “World Championship Rowing” T-shirts.

But the crew’s philosophy is to turn any disadvantages--financial or geographic--into advantages. And they believe that being outside the Eastern rowing establishment may be a great advantage.

“No one knows how fast we are and we have no outside pressure on us,” Gruenberg said.