With the fall season behind and winter break approaching, Women's Head Coach Justin Moore discussed changes in his first few months, some surprises and the tough route ahead in an interview with Orange Oar Editor John Nicholson. Quotes from that discussion appeared in the December issue of The Orange Oar.
Here is the complete interview:Q. You say you're going slowly but on the right direction.
A. Well you want to come in and hit the ground running with your team but there are certain things that need to happen prior to getting to team up and running and one is getting to know one another and then two is getting to establish the directionality.
You certainly want to hit the ground running - you don’t want to be running in the wrong direction and so the process of getting to know the team and the team getting to know the coaching staff is not a fast one. It’s a relationship and it takes time to build. And every day we went to practice I was impressed with the women’s attitude and I was also impressed with some of the things that we discovered. In fact I was surprised with some of the things that we discovered along the way. And one of the things that we came to understand was that some of the assumptions that we had made about who was fast and who was not fast were incorrect.
And we worked through the fall and I believe by the end of the fall when we went down to race the Foot of the Charles we had done a very good job of finding our top or A four, our B four, our C four and our D four. I think we did a good of establishing that order. And it was very interesting to see where some people who had formerly been in the varsity positions or positions that would indicate that they were top athletes on the team which boat the ended up in and vice-versa. Some women that came in and didn’t have a big reputation on the team just performed very, very well.
Q Now when you say there have been some changes- the stern four from last spring’s varsity eight was gone for one reason or another anyhow. Are there any – right now – still you see in the varsity eight as you head into the winter training?
A. Well if you look at the varsity eight as our A and our B four – in our A four that boat consisted of two first-year rowers (Rebecca Soja and Miranda Williams) and two second-year rowers. So obviously the first-year rowers were not in last year’s varsity. The second-year rowers – one of them was injured last year so was not in last year’s varsity and she has returned from injury and is doing very, very well. Her name is Tiffany Macon. And the other person, Macey Miller was in last year’s varsity for a very brief period of time, but just came back and is really showing that she has the capacity to help the boat make its rhythm and have the boat go fast and she earned that seat stroking the A four. The coxswain of that boat was Allison Todd and she was the JV coxswain from last year.
You move into our B boat and Rachael Ogundiran, who was in last year’s varsity, was in that B boat. After that, Emma Karpowicz was in the four and in the JV last year Carmen Failla was injured --- had issues last year so did not row a single stroke so she was not in there and then the fourth person in there Maggie McCrudden is another first year. And so right now in the top eight athletes one of them is returning from last year’s varsity.
Q. A number of people who were on the team last spring are no longer on the team. How did that come about?
A. When you have a change of coach and a change of leadership you also have a change of methods a change in priorities, a change in your philosophy and a few women, a very few at the very beginning came in and saw that and they didn’t necessarily see a role for them, didn’t necessarily want to buy into that new philosophy, so they withdrew themselves – said, “I’m done.”
And on the team my goal was not to cut anybody from our team but I would say it’s essential that everyone on our team had a role and everyone on our team had the correct attitude about the training and what we were trying to accomplish within that role. So if there was a woman on the team who ended up not having a role we didn’t keep her on the team because that’s a frustrating position for her as well as for us.
Athletes need to know their role and need to know how they’re going to contribute and we had an instance where we had more coxswains at the beginning than we had roles for so our choice was to possibly intermix them in the training – but the problem is your coxswains don’t get better if they don’t drive the boat and so we brought the squad down to the number of coxswains on the squad down to the number that we felt everyone could have a role and everyone could have a place where they could possibly contribute.
And then from the rowing standpoint there were a few women who were either a) unhappy with the position they were in or b) weren’t fully decided if they wanted to commit themselves 100-percent to changing the direction of the team. And we had discussions with them and said if you decide that you really want to do this we’re welcome to have you back but we can’t have you being here, we can’t have you coming to practice undecided about what it is you want to do.
Q. It seems obvious that if someone is in the A four right now – theoretically in the first boat – it’s a long way to spring. What do you foresee during winter? What’s your approach going to be and is it a pretty good bet there are going to be more changes by the time you start racing in the spring?
A. I think there are women who are talented enough to challenge for those seats and I think that the winter time is a time where real change can occur. In particular, when women go home for Christmas break and they have a number of weeks where they are left to their own discipline and left to their own choices, not with the momentum of the team to train or the assisted discipline from the coaches, not certainly a time when I have in my history as a coach seen women make drastic changes either for the better or for the worse, coming back from break, so it will be very interesting for me to see how the women conduct themselves and what level of quality of training they do on their own over break.
The eight women that we have currently in those A and B fours – they’ve shown a great propensity to work and so it will be interesting to me…if somebody is going to remove them, she’s going to have to do a great job because I don’t foresee any of these women going home and allowing their seats to be vulnerable. I can however see other women going home and doing a tremendous amount of work and moving themselves into that discussion.
Q. You seem pretty excited about traveling with the men’s team together for training over break.
A. Yeah. I think so. The men…we’re in a place right now where the men were a number of years ago, eight years ago and I rely a lot on Dave’s wisdom and experience. He’s been through that. He’s been through rebuilding a team at Syracuse. And he and I sit down and we have a lot of long talks about the process, what’s important, how you keep everyone on the path, how you respond to really difficult experiences… competitive experiences like we experienced this year at the Princeton Chase.
And I’m also excited that the men are going really fast right now and we are smart enough to use them as a comparative benchmark. And we actually, at the very end of the fall were even lucky enough to get our women’s eight out with the men’s coxed fours, which have a very similar time standard. We did some wonderful work together along the buoy line and that is absolutely fantastic for the women and I hope it’s equally good for the men.
Q. How much contact are you getting from alums – how much support, how much feedback, if you will, so far?
A. For the alums who have connected, the support has been excellent. I couldn’t tell you what ‘a lot’ was relative to what has occurred in the past. Certainly none of these alums know me personally and those who have reached out have reached out because they care greatly about the program as a whole.
I hope that there is more connection between the women’s alumnae and the current women’s crew. I think that’s a really important part of being a member of this crew; understanding the historic significance of this team, understanding the rich history of this team and also understanding when you’re on the other side, that despite the fantastic opportunities provided by gender equity and Title IX, the work isn’t ending there. And I think the more the women come back and connect to the team, the more the current undergraduates can see how meaningful their sport experience was in shaping them as the women that they now are, I think the more important the sport becomes to these undergraduate women.
Q. What did you make of the fall weekend and the gathering of alums and dedication of shells and stuff like that?
A. That was really enjoyable. Being here on that race weekend, where you saw so many alums back and so many alums with great things to say about the program, it was a real joy to be a part of such a historic program – one where the roots go back to the original days of rowing, whether they are with women or not – the history inevitably is intertwined.
And for me to see Doc (Chamberlain) up there receiving his award and seeing so many alums who had such heartfelt gratitude to him as a mentor and as a person… it helps you keep in perspective what you’re trying to do as a coach – the way that you can affect these people – that eventually these young kids who are standing there watching it with varying levels of interest – you’re going to understand it’s a wink of an eye ‘til they’re in those shoes.
It moves by very quickly and you as a coach want to look back and understand that you’re affecting them in the way that these alums who were speaking were affected by such a man.
Q Anything else you want to tell our readers?
A. I want to express again how excited I am to be here. It’s been hard. It’s been slow going. I liken it to kind of some of the rally difficult battles that were experience in World War I and World War II where you were in the trenches and maybe sometimes 15 feet is all you gain in a day.
But what I want the people who are supporting the program and have the potential to support the program to know is that in our darkest moments this fall, when we went to a race and got absolutely clobbered I drove home and I wondered how the women were going to respond to this kind of defeat. And I wondered if some of them were going to conclude that it wasn’t worth the effort; that they were too far away from being good, or too far away from achieving for them to put forward that level of effort. And as tired as I felt after being beaten badly, and as sad as you get when you take a loss like that, the opposite was felt on Monday, when the women rolled off the bus and they walked in and they made laser-like eye contact with you and they said, “Coach, what can we do to get better today?”
And the truth is we were more than a minute behind Buffalo when we raced them in Rochester in the varsity event. We were 47 seconds behind Buffalo. We later came back in the fall and turned that result around where every time we race them we got closer to them, got past them or got further away from them. So while we’re not where we want to be we are absolutely moving in the right direction and while the women are not getting the results that they want to have they are showing up every day willing to work for the result that they want to have. And I hope four months from now that daily progress that that 15 feet of trench, or ten feet of trench or two feet of trench, or whatever it is turns out to be a really successful campaign.
