Shell Game : After 17 Years, Loyola Rowers Return to National Competition

Oarsmen love a good adage.

Understandably so. Slogans like “pleasure is sweet after pain” and “rowing is poetry in motion” soothe an rower’s self-esteem, making him feel more like an athlete than a galley slave.

“Why else would you want to get up at 5:30 in the morning and then have a coach run you into the ground every day?” asked Mike Bailey, the 25-year-old coach of Loyola Marymount’s burgeoning men’s crew program.

“Waking up every morning, I ask myself why,” said Jorge Endara, captain of Loyola’s lightweight eights boat. “But on the water, when everyone gets the pace, there’s nothing like it. You just glide.”

Heavyweight eights captain Pat Kelly agreed. “It’s easier knowing that the competition--all the other guys up and down the coast--are working out just as hard,” he said. “It’s almost like proving yourself to yourself every day.”

Loyola’s college crews prove themselves primarily on 2,000-meter courses, in eight-seat shells with four oars on each side and a coxswain who steers the craft. It is one of the most physically demanding sports in the world.

It’s no wonder, then, that college crewmen lean heavily on mottoes and catchwords like camaraderie , pride and tradition . The same words you expect to see across a Marine Corps recruiting poster, but they also are maxims that are held sacred in collegiate crew.

The sport that began with spirited races between scaled-down triremes in ancient Greece--and evolved into a pastime of young English gentlemen at Cambridge and Oxford--now has a foothold at Loyola Marymount. Under the leadership of first-year coaches Bailey and Lori Pawinski, Loyola’s crew teams will compete in the national collegiate championships for the first time in nearly two decades.

Pawinski’s womens lightweight eights, top-ranked on the Pacific Coast, will travel to Tioga, Pa., for the nationals on June 4-5.

And Bailey’s heavyweight crew, split into two fours, will have a berth in the Intercollegiate Rowing Assn.’s nationals in Syracuse, N.Y., on Thursday. Bailey’s lightweights, fourth-ranked on the Pacific Coast, will row in the nationals at Albany, N.Y., on June 11.

“It’s going to be a busy week,” Bailey said.

Loyola’s last appearance in an Intercollegiate Rowing Assn. regatta was in 1971, under the school’s first crew coach, John Lind. Since then, the program, which is considered a varsity sport at Loyola, has been dead in the water after a series of coaching changes.

That is, until Bailey, a former coxswain at the University of Wisconsin, answered Loyola’s advertisement in U.S. Rowing magazine for a part-time coach/rigger and set some ambitious changes into motion.

Bailey took the helm from Russ Schatz last September. He spent the first part of the fall repairing all of Loyola’s old wooden crew shells, buying new motors for his coaching launches (small powerboats that Bailey uses to track his crews in training).

Then he bought a used truck to haul the Lions’ trailer that transports the crew shells after the old truck threw a piston rod.

Then, after Bailey and his teams raised $50,000--the crews even worked inventory for the May Co. to earn $8,000 for the program--they rewarded themselves with the grand prize: two new, top-of-the-line 60-foot crew shells, hand-tooled in Vermont out of carbon fiber, fiberglass and wood, costing $10,000 apiece.

As a coach, Bailey carries some fine credentials: He was an assistant coach for the Wisconsin crew that was top-ranked in the nation two years ago.

The 5-foot-9, 140-pound former coxswain commands respect from his crews, and he considers himself an authoritarian coach.

“In rowing, if you’re a relaxed coach, your crews will be laid-back and mellow,” he said. “Good coaches are aggressive and pay attention to detail, because the key to rowing is aggressive rowers.”

Endara agreed that Bailey’s coaching style is inspiring. “Bailey drives us hard, but he knows when he’s pushing too much,” he said. “He’s a short guy, but he’s one guy you don’t want to mess with.”

A typical training day for Endara and his fellow oarsmen begins at 5:30 a.m. At a quarter to 6, the crews stretch out at Loyola’s boathouse at Fisherman’s Village in Marina del Rey, and by 6 they’re on the water.

And when they’re not sliding across the marina’s placid waters in their sleek shells, Loyola’s oarsmen are toiling on conditioning. They work out with weights, run up hills, climb steps and row on “ergometers,” simulated rowing machines that are affectionately known as “ergs.”

“We do just about anything we can think of to whip ‘em into shape,” Bailey said. Then, as an afterthought, he added, “Oh, yeah, we also row.”

They do just that, although in only a handful of competitive regattas, the last of which was a disappointing showing in the Pacific Coast Rowing Championships last weekend at Lake Natoma near Sacramento. Despite its improvements this year, Loyola’s crew program is still trailing traditional Pacific powers like Stanford, Washington, California and UCLA.

The success of UCLA’s program (UCLA has three heavyweight crews, Loyola just one) is something Loyola’s crews know very well. Since both schools share training waters in Marina del Rey and its adjacent Ballona Creek, it’s not unusual for Loyola’s oarsmen to spot the Bruins off the starboard bow during an afternoon practice run.

“We see them quite a bit,” Bailey said. “The marina and the creek don’t belong to them, so there’s nothing they can say about it.”

The marina generally has glassy waters in the early morning, but it isn’t without its hazards. Lumbering fishing charters that leave the outer channel at dawn can stir up wakes of up to 4 feet, big enough to turn a crew shell into the collegiate version of “Das Boot” or at least severely damage its fragile seams.

“The Harbor Patrol does a little bit to address the problem,” Bailey said, “but not as much as they could be doing.”

In addition to freak wakes and the occasional Bruin encounter, Loyola’s home racing course--the creek--has its own set of problems. When the creek floods after a heavy rain, it can carry as many waterborne obstacles as the Persian Gulf--”bottles, cans and all kinds of junk,” Bailey said.

In earlier years, the Loyola crews themselves were a problem in the marina--at least to a handful of neighboring apartment dwellers whose morning slumber was snapped by chanting coaches, coxswains and crewmen. But the development of the “Cox-Box,” a device through which the coxswain communicates to the crew via a headset and microphone, has helped solve noise problems.

Bailey thinks his hard-luck heavyweights are much better than their ninth ranking suggests. For example: Earlier this year, at a regatta in San Diego, Loyola’s heavyweights were ahead of eventual winner UC Davis when they plowed into a buoy in a crosswind. Loyola finished fourth that day.

Maybe breaking the heavyweight eights into two fours for the nationals will improve their luck. The heavyweight crew consists of Kelly in the stroke seat, Randy Lococo, Bob Morelli, John Buckley, Pete Brown, Pete O’Donnell, Geoff Stricklin and Dave Younkin on the other oars and Jennifer Mulvyhill as the coxswain. The average height and weight for these rowers is 6-3, 190 pounds.

The lightweight boat has been slightly more successful. It will race as an eight in Albany, and it is made up of Endara, Mike Vigil, Jeff Elliott, John Vowels, Anders Rosenquist, Vince Passanisi, Eric Gullet, Pat Carney and coxswain Carlo Abesamis. These lightweights are 6-footers on the average but can weigh no more than 160 pounds.

Pawinski, 24, also a first year coach, guided her lightweight eights to the top ranking on the Pacific Coast this year.

The crew, which beat Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Seattle-Pacific to win the Pacific Coast title last week, consists of: Mary Huffman, Christine Renola, Julie Rivas, Katie Burke, Bridgid Petro, Jennifer Collins, Kellie Farley, Julie Hackworth and coxswain Cathy Castaneda.

When all eight oars are in sync, the shell can glide across the water like a silvery torpedo, with Bailey’s motor launch pinned to its wake as the coach gives instructions.

“Rowing,” Bailey said, “is like eight golfers trying to hit a hole-in-one on the same hole at the same time.”

It’s just another adage, but one of the kind that oarsmen love so well.