Orange Coast Boasting an Impressive Crew

When Orange Coast College meets a team like Michigan, the mismatch seems overwhelming, whatever the sport.

But the community college from Costa Mesa is expected to do quite well Sunday when it rows against Michigan--and Ohio State, Georgetown, Michigan State, and Virginia among others--for a national championship on Lake Lanier near Atlanta.

The only two-year college in the country with an intercollegiate crew program, Orange Coast has been a power for more than 30 years, even though its athletes have only half the time to master this tough and technical sport before graduating.

Orange Coast has tried to overcome that obstacle by providing a state-of-the-art training facility on North Lido Channel in Newport Beach, equipment as good as the U.S. Olympic team’s and support from a world-class coaching staff.

Then there’s the determination of its rowers.

“If we had two more years like our opponents do, we could be insanely fast,” said Bill Clifford, a sophomore from Seattle and captain of Orange Coast’s varsity eight. “Unfortunately, we don’t have those extra years, but it makes us work that much harder.”

Crew presents the ultimate team-building challenge: Take eight people of different sizes and shapes and figure out how to get them to pull together in perfect synchronization so they can rocket a 60-foot-long shell along 2,000 meters of flat water.

Because of its high degree of difficulty, rowing has long been considered the perfect collegiate sport, honing young minds and bodies with an activity requiring brains, brawn, endurance and mental toughness.

Orange Coast Coach Dave Grant has been selling this ideal since 1963, and judging from the results, his athletes are buying it.

Grant’s crews have won more than 80% of their races and has a standing invitation to row in England at the Henley Royal Regatta, the sport’s equivalent to Wimbledon.

Perhaps more important, the great majority of Orange Coast rowers go on to study and compete at four-year colleges.

Most join the program with little or no rowing experience, attracted by Grant’s only organized recruiting effort: hauling one of the giant eight-person shells up to the Costa Mesa campus off Fairview Road during the first few days of the fall semester.

“We just set it there next to a table with some information,” Grant said. “If you see one of these big beautiful shells, they really are a draw. You don’t have to say too much.”

Orange Coast also gets its share of experienced rowers, hoping to develop into standouts and earn scholarships to rowing powers such as California and Washington.

“I get five e-mails a week from all over,” Grant said.

Those who show up for the gut-wrenching 6:30 a.m. workouts six days a week, and stick with it, get more than just the benefit of technical expertise from Grant, who was an assistant coach with the 1984 U.S. Olympic rowing team.

At this level, Grant is more teacher and mentor than coach, a natural role for someone first hired by Orange Coast as a history professor. He was also the college’s dean of students and president before retiring in 1997.

He took a few sabbaticals from crew--one to sail in a 28-foot sloop from Newport Beach to the South Pacific--along the way, but always returned to the boathouse. Thanks to Grant’s fund-raising efforts over the years, the program pays its way with an endowment of nearly $1 million.

At 5 feet 8, Grant is dwarfed by his athletes but few had more energy at practice last week than the trim 63-year-old. But his emphasis quickly changed when training came to a close. A few rowers lingered on the docks afterward, and Grant greeted them with his mantra: “Go to class. Get out of here. Go to class.”

Grant repeated it with a smile, though from his look it was obvious he was serious. His manner is low-key and informal--his athletes call him Dave--but he is firm when it comes to education.

Many students come to community colleges with academic deficiencies and Grant steps in to make sure his rowers don’t leave as merely jocks. He pushes them into courses with credits that will transfer to four-year schools and prods them to become scholars.

“If a community college is anything, it’s a second chance for people,” Grant said. “And there are very few things in life as good as a second chance.”

Craig Amerkhanian, now Stanford’s crew coach, took advantage of Orange Coast’s opportunity.

In 1975, he came to Orange Coast as a football, basketball and baseball player from Anaheim Savanna High who expected to end up at a Cal State school. After becoming a rower for Grant, Amerkhanian set his sights higher. He went on to row at California, where he earned a degree. Three of his Orange Coast teammates went to Stanford.

“Those are pretty neat transfer opportunities from Costa Mesa, California,” Amerkhanian said, “and that’s all on Dave’s shoulders. He created these opportunities for us by making sure we were diligent in our classwork and also thorough in learning how to row.”

Amerkhanian’s crew was fast enough to take on an international challenge at the Royal Henley Regatta in 1977.

It was the fourth of 10 trips Orange Coast has made to the Thames, and the first time the college won a race, advancing to a semifinal.

In the years since, Orange Coast has dominated Southern California rowing, although some of that ascendance has come by default. The men’s teams at many schools, among them former national power UCLA, have been eliminated and replaced by weaker club programs. That is part of the reason Orange Coast moved up to compete on the varsity level instead of junior varsity in the 1990s and why the crews are in Georgia this weekend.

“You need to keep stretching,” Grant said. “You need to keep finding ways to allow oarsmen to be challenged. It’s no fun to win when it’s easy, there’s no joy in that at all.”

This season’s journey will continue Sunday on Lake Lanier’s 1996 Olympic rowing course. Three Orange Coast crews--the men’s varsity eight, men’s novice eight and women’s varsity eight--will compete in the Avaya Collegiate Rowing Championship, against four-year colleges that don’t award rowing scholarships.

Grant said his varsity crew--sophomores Clifford, Chris Kolstad of Long Beach, Brian Scheele of Seattle, Dan Toth of Huntington Beach, Brett Winfield of Newport Beach, Aaron Clousing of Irvine, Ryan Davidson of San Francisco, freshman Lucas Ridinger of Seattle, and sophomore coxswain Sam Yost of Dana Point--is one of the fastest he has coached.

If the boat finishes in the top two or three, Grant said, he will take the crew to England in July for the 157th Henley Regatta, which would mark the 30th anniversary of Orange Coast’s first trip there.

“They are very tough and very aggressive,” Grant said of his rowers, “and they have a great sense of humor and I have found that is an important factor, to be able to laugh and have a lot of fun with it.”

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OCC Crew Team Up to Challenge

Orange Coast College Will compete Sunday $25,000 racing shells that weigh about 200 pounds. Made of carbon fiber and Kevlar, the sleek crafts are rowed in synchronization along a 2,000-meter course.

Source: Orange Coast College