For Babraj, Getting the Correct Mix of Rowers Is Half the Fun

You know the workout is getting serious when Coach Zenon Babraj brings out the rubber hoses.

The hoses, threaded with bungee cords and hooked under the boat, create additional drag. It’s a way to help the oarsmen feel the boat.

Babraj needed the UCLA rowers to feel the boat. He wanted to see how each responded to the changes. The UCLA varsity crew candidates were midway through a recent selection camp at Lake Natoma near Sacramento, and Babraj had not found the right combination of eight rowers--the right people or the right order--to man the first boat. Nevertheless, Babraj enjoying himself.

“I love the process,” he said, referring to the work of preparing, training and selecting the athletes. “When it comes to the race, my work is done. I try to squeeze from them as much speed as possible. That’s the fun of it.”

Toward the end of the camp, the academic suspension of the university’s best rower, Craig Webster of Long Beach, was confirmed. It was a blow to the crew as well as to Webster, and all the more difficult in that Babraj had, in three years of precise work, transformed the young man into a fluid rower.

“The rhythm evolved around him,” Babraj said. “Now I have to find somebody to take his place.”

Working with a core of five returning Pacific 10 champion varsity rowers, Babraj added two more senior oarsmen, a senior coxswain and an experienced sophomore. He arranged the eight oarsmen according to their power, finesse, aggressiveness, balance, weight, personality and feel for the water.

“Guys in the wrong position make five or six seconds difference in a race,” Babraj said. “If they aren’t connected, it doesn’t work.”

The eventual result of that “connection,” Babraj’s choices in the recent selection camp, is shown in the accompanying graphic of UCLA’s eight for 1989.