Rowing to relevance
Decades in the making and born out of Title IX, UT program finally makes its mark
AUSTIN — Most rowing stories begin a long way from the water. They start at folding card tables set up on the quad, with colorful fliers and a racing shell to grab the attention of passers-by. They start in college cafeterias, where coaches desperate for talent approach every coed standing at least 5-10 and ask if she has played sports.
And in many of these stories, the opening scene actually takes place much earlier, on the floor of the U.S. Senate. There, in 1972, Indiana’s Birch Bayh introduced a piece of legislation that came to be known as Title IX.
That is the true start of the rowing saga at Texas, where the Longhorns only recently have made it a tale worth telling. Their women’s team is a powerhouse now, with a seventhplace national finish last year and a chance to fare even better this spring.
To get to this point, the UT program had to navigate its way through multiple waves of apparent beginnings. There was a lawsuit and a settlement. There was the hiring of one coach to get the program off the dock and then another to finally get it moving. There were all of the moments when athletes like Gia Doonan, a key member of this year’s team, were coaxed into giving the sport a try even though they never had been in a boat.
But when Doonan sat down to write a research paper for a class this semester, she knew she needed to go back further than that. Her thesis statement? UT rowing — and everything it has become — would not exist if it had not been for Title IX, the landmark federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions.
“Without it, this wouldn’t be possible,” Doonan said. “Our future would look completely different.”
A need for numbers
Almost two decades before Doonan wrote her paper, Kate Ronkainen stumbled upon a similar discovery about how the ramifications of Title IX could change her path.
Like thousands of others who end up pulling on oars in college boats, Ronkainen didn’t know anything about rowing as a teenager. In the mid 1990s, she played high school basketball at Klein, and she came to UT wanting to pursue a degree in studio art.
One day walking through the campus’ west mall, her 5-11 frame caught the eye of UT rowing club members who had set up a recruiting table. She gave it a shot for a few months before giving it up.
“I really liked being on the water, and I liked the competitive aspect of it,” Ronkainen said. “But there wasn’t really a reason to stick with it.”
At the same time, though, UT leaders were working on a plan that would give her one. In 1992, the school was sued by a group of seven female students who said UT’s athletic department — which had more athletes on the football team than in the entire women’s program — was in violation of Title IX.
In 1993, the school settled the lawsuit, agreeing to expand and add women’s teams to ensure female scholarships and participation were in equal proportion to the men’s teams. So the Longhorns made plans to start varsity softball and soccer teams, but the male-to-female ratio was still out of whack.
“We needed a big number,” UT women’s athletic director Chris Plonsky said. They found it in rowing. All across the country, other universities struggling to comply with Title IX found their numbers in the same place. From 1995-99, the number of NCAA women’s crew teams doubled. In 1997, the NCAA hosted its first rowing national championships.
The reason? Rowing teams are huge. The NCAA allows schools to offer a maximum of 20 rowing scholarships, but that money can be split among multiple athletes, and with walk-ons, many squads include more than 60 members. And that helps balance the numbers created by football teams that distribute 85 scholarships and often feature more than 100 players.
So when Texas started its rowing program in 1998, the goal was simple.
“You hire a staff and you say, ‘Have a big team,’ ” Plonsky said.
To have that big team, the Longhorns needed people like Ronkainen, who had left the club squad. When she heard rowing could be more than just a grueling pastime, she was eager to come back.
“We were offered book scholarships and a chance to travel,” Ronkainen said. “We were psyched.”
The catch, of course, is they had no hope of being competitive. Ronkainen, who went on to compete for the U.S. national team, was one of the few Division I-caliber rowers on the squad.
“What you had was a group of club rowers who transitioned to varsity, regardless of whether they were qualified,” Ronkainen said. “We hadn’t been groomed to be college athletes. We were all successful students, and all of a sudden they were trying to retrofit us into the program.”
Carie Graves, the coach assigned with building Texas rowing from scratch, had a thankless job in those days. She had to grab rowers from where she could find them, knowing that championships weren’t part of her job description.
But were there moments when the women on those early teams thought they might be part of a program that could be an NCAA superpower?
“Oh, hell no,” Ronkainen said. “The way we were talked to, it was never about winning national titles. It was about making it to the next race.”
Explosion in popularity
Dave O’Neill has his rowing origin story, too, and it sounds familiar.
He was a freshman at Boston College in the late 1980s when he saw members of the club team looking for help. He had played hockey and ran track in high school, and he wanted something to keep him active, so he jumped in.
“Then I decided, ‘I wanted to get good at this,’ ” O’Neill said.
Soon, he became known as “The Rowing Guy” on campus. He medaled at the U.S. Rowing Nationals and other major events, and he went on to become coach of Boston College’s women’s team. At the time, the sport was dominated by Ivy League schools and was confined mainly to the Northeast.
Then, in the mid-1990s, as huge athletic programs started dealing with the ramifications of Title IX, new rowing programs popped up at places like Ohio State and Michigan. Everyone in the sport took notice.
“There was a big concern that this was going to be a game-changer,” O’Neill said.
The sport’s explosion turned rowing into a boon for female students looking to participate in college athletics and to earn scholarship money. According to a survey by the National Federation of State High School Associations, NCAA and NAIA programs handed out 2,080 rowing scholarships in 2013-14. That same year, there were only 4,242 girls competing on high school teams (not counting clubs).
That translated into a scholarship for almost one out of every two high school rowers, compared to a 1-to-40 ratio in women’s soccer, a 1-to-43 ratio in women’s basketball and a 1-to-50 ratio in softball.
And as rowing’s popularity soared, so did O’Neill’s career. He went from Boston College to California, where he coached for 16 seasons, winning two team national titles and twice being named national coach of the year.
Meanwhile, the program at UT floated listlessly.
Although the Longhorns experienced moments of success under Graves, who Plonsky praised for her hard work and patience in getting the program started, they never made nationals as a team during her 16 seasons. And when Graves decided to retire in 2014, Plonsky knew a team with UT’s massive athletics budget and picturesque home course at Lady Bird Lake needed to take a step forward.
“It was time,” Plonsky said. “We had a holster full of ammo. We just weren’t capitalizing on it yet.”
Plonsky knew the best way to do so was to pursue O’Neill, who was looking for a new challenge. He arrived in the summer of 2014 and told his new rowers he was going to hold them to the same standards he did at Cal.
“Some of them thought it would be a magic trick, a magic workout,” O’Neill said. “Then they realized, ‘Oh, it’s just a whole lot of work.’ ”
A sense of belonging
Even now, after the UT tower has been lit in orange to commemorate a Big 12 championship and with the team sporting a national top-10 ranking, the Longhorns’ rowers still sometimes feel like outsiders.
“Going up to the (athletic) dining hall, people are like, ‘Oh, rowing, what is that again?’” said Doonan. “A lot of people don’t know it’s a real sport.”
“In a way,” junior Emily Froehlich said, “we’re still kind of trying to earn our spot.”
More and more, that spot is being established.
Thanks in large part to Doonan and Froehlich, the Longhorns, who are competing for the Big 12 title this weekend at Oak Ridge, Tenn., are a strong bet to return to the NCAA championships for the second time in the program’s history. And there are other signs of progress, too.
Professors are asking about their meets. Athletes in other sports are offering congratulations. And on the sixth floor of Bellmont Hall, more than 50 ergometers — the rowing machines that used to be crammed into a corner of a weight room — fill a sparkling new practice space.
“A whole room dedicated to rowing,” Doonan said, beaming. “We’d never had that before.”
With the improved amenities and attention come increased expectations, and the Longhorns welcome them. O’Neill said it is realistic that this year’s team can finish among the top four in the country, and merely making that statement illustrates how far the program has come.
“It wasn’t a realistic goal before he got here,” Doonan said. “He reshaped what we thought was hard.”
Across the country, people are watching.
In Seattle, where she now works as a product manager for Zillow, Ronkainen has been elated to watch a breakthrough she never dreamed was possible when she rowed at Texas.
“I think it’s awesome,” Ronkainen said.
And as UT’s rowing story continues to unfold, O’Neill, Doonan and Froehlich said it is time for the plot to change. Yes, it all began with Title IX and making the numbers work. But now it’s about more. “We’re not just something to balance football,” O’Neill said. “We want to win.”