Out at Lake Michie, a 30-minute drive from West Campus, the women's rowing program calls a small part of the shore home. Open trailers and an unpainted wooden shed house the program's oars, equipment and boat shells.
When those boats are on the water, they can move at tremendous speeds behind the force of strong, fit female athletes. At the starting line of a race, the hull of the boat sits deep in the water. As the race begins, the rowers take several half strokes to lift the boat to the top of the water, where they can perform full strokes with maximum effect.
As Duke rowing begins its spring season, after more than eight years of half strokes, the program may just now be reaching the top of the water.
Promoted to the varsity level largely because of Title IX requirements and without a true long-term vision, the program has still managed to achieve success in the sport. The Blue Devils are currently ranked second in the South region, and the first varsity eight boat was named ACC Crew of the Week Monday after finishing 3-1 at the Longhorn Invitational in Texas over spring break.
But the program has also faced a number of challenges and internal issues that have hindered its growth. A concerning frequency of injuries and a high turnover rate have limited the team's depth, and the program still has no true facilities of its own as the rowers toil in virtual anonymity miles from a campus on which many do not realize the sport is indeed varsity.
Title IX was signed into law in 1972, with the intent of preventing any discrimination based on sex by educational institutions. Since 1979, its primary interpretation has been as it relates to athletics programs.
By the numbers, Title IX is working. The number of women competing in varsity sports at NCAA schools has risen from 74,239 in 1982 to 166,728 in 2005. But some of the requirements have come under criticism as an artificial quota system, especially as several schools have cut men's sports to reach an adequate proportionality.
Duke has followed Title IX since its enforcement, but the regulation had its most direct effect in 1997. The Duke women's club rowing squad first petitioned for varsity status in 1994, but for three years was not promoted.
In 1997, however, the National Women's Law Center filed a complaint against 25 schools, including Duke, claiming discrimination in their athletics departments. Duke's settlement of this complaint with the Office of Civil Rights required the school to keep the proportion of women's scholarship money within one percent of their participation rate. By adding rowing and its 16 scholarships-the NCAA maximum is 20 for the sport-the University was able to satisfy the requirements.
By adding rowing instead of softball, the athletics department was able to boost female participation rates without a high initial investment in new facilities.
"We had complied with Title IX from the standpoint that we had continually showed progress," Director of Athletics Joe Alleva said. "But we had to keep showing that, and rowing was the next natural sport to add because it involved a lot of women and we had a really good interest of the sport through the club program."
Duke remained in such good standing with the Title IX requirements that the OCR released the school from monitoring a year earlier than planned. Today, the athletic proportionality is not quite equal-females constitute 42.7 percent of athletes and 48 percent of the student body-however, the financial equality mandated by the OCR is evident, as female athletes receive 45.9 percent of athletic financial aid.
But did Duke rush adding a rowing program to satisfy Title IX requirements at the expense of the program's potential for success? Certainly, facing a complaint of not complying with a federal law, the University needed to act quickly to reach a settlement. But nine years since the inception of the program, Duke's rowing squad is still dealing with such basic issues as program depth and adequate facilities.
"I think the administration didn't understand rowing as a sport, and they didn't understand how capital-intensive it was," head coach Robyn Horner said. "Duke is a natural fit for rowing, because most of the kids that row in high school are very academically-oriented. I think we just have to figure out how to get our facilities up to par."
Duke added rowing as a varsity sport in the midst of a larger national trend. While some schools have had intercollegiate teams since the 1800s, the phenomenon of women's rowing as a scholarship sport is a recent one, spurred almost completely by the requirements of Title IX. Despite its costs, rowing is an ideal sport for improving an athletics department's proportionality figures because it provides opportunities to so many women-last year Duke's program included 63 athletes-and helps balance out a Division I school's 85 football scholarships.
And the growth has been tremendous, outpacing the already noticeable growth in women's sports in general. In the 1982-83 season, there were 25 varsity women's rowing teams in Division I featuring 831 athletes. By the 2004-05 season, those numbers had skyrocketed to 85 teams with 5,101 women. That increase was sixfold, while the overall numbers in women's Division I sports slightly more than doubled.
Such rapid growth has created an abundance of rowing programs searching for a dearth of athletes. In the United States, collegiate rowers outnumber high school rowers nearly 3 to 1, leaving many programs, including Duke, to rely on foreign talent and non-scholarship walk-ons. This year's Blue Devil roster features six rowers from Canada and two from Australia.
"There are not enough high-end athletes in the U.S. yet to supply all the schools that are recruiting them," Horner said. "Because what we've basically seen is a jump from maybe five schools that had varsity rowing programs to like 85 schools."
Issues persist with facilities
Due to issues obtaining a suitable plot of land, the project of building a new boathouse has not yet broken ground, despite the fact that Duke's "Athletic Policy Manual," last revised in September 2003, stated, "Construction of a boathouse for women's rowing, currently in the planning stage, is the most pressing facility need for women's athletics."
After looking at a number of other plots on Lake Michie and on other local lakes, Alleva said the new boathouse will be built in the location where the team currently practices and houses its equipment. Nearly all the other options were either deemed financially infeasible or were rejected by the Durham City Council.
Alleva said he is currently going through the process of obtaining final approval and funding to build the new boathouse, and that construction will most likely begin sometime this summer or fall.
For now, Duke must compete for recruits against schools that have multi-million dollar boathouses with facilities that often are not as good as those at the prospect's high school.
"A lot of times what we experience is, we'll get some of the top kids from the U.S [who are interested in Duke]," Horner said. "And then they'll come on a visit and be like, 'Are you kidding me?'"
The rowing program also hopes to catch up to several of its peer programs with the eventual addition of an indoor tank, which would serve as a useful alternative to rowing machines and could improve the efficiency of a team whose practice site is a half-hour from campus.
"Looking at building a boathouse, looking at building a tank, those are all fairly expensive propositions," Horner said. "I don't know if they planned that far down the road."
Even without major facilities, the operational costs of the program are the highest of any non-revenue sport at Duke. From October 2005 to October 2006, the University spent $210,007 on rowing expenses, not including scholarship money. Much of the expenses stem from the pricey boats and equipment, the extensive amount of travel to away regattas and the constant cost of transportation for the entire team back and forth to Lake Michie.
A troubling trend of injuries
While the facility concerns are largely out of the program's immediate control, overuse and poorly-monitored health have contributed to a large number of injuries that have significantly slowed its development.
In a sport based on a repetitive motion, the number of overuse injuries is fairly high, but within Duke's program the frequency, especially of more serious injuries, has concerned players and coaches. One former rower, who left the team at the end of her freshman year, estimated that at any one time last season, as many as 10 girls would be limited in their activity because of injury.
On weeks during which the team is not competing, there are afternoon workouts every weekday-two on the lake-a team yoga and pilates class Friday morning and a Saturday morning practice on the lake. In addition, the rowers are expected to do multiple individual workouts during the week to maintain their conditioning. Although many on the team said the afternoon practices are a huge improvement over the morning team practices that were the norm before last season, some said the intensity and volume of the physical effort are the reasons for a disproportionate number of injuries in the team's history.
"I don't think it would hinder us to have more recovery time," said Amber Straight, a senior who is unable to compete because of a bulging disk in her back. "By the end of the week, I would feel very worn out and I would feel like the practices I was doing weren't helping anymore."
Horner defended the practice load, saying it is on par or even less intense than peer programs. Many of the injuries of previous years may have come from the combination of a training room not familiar with ailments particular to rowing and a coaching staff eager to get athletes back from injury. The training staff declined to provide comment for this story, but the rowing program was given its own trainer for the first time this season.
"We have not had any new serious injury come up this year, which has not been the case in the past," Horner said. "One of the adaptations that the training room has made is just realizing if our kids get tendinitis, it's not OK to let them go a week more and see what happens."
This year, the team has also attempted to cut down on the number of injuries by focusing in the weight room on preventative measures for susceptible areas. The price of that learning curve, however, is not simply a few less competitive seasons. Several athletes suffered severe injuries in their back, knees and shoulders, often requiring surgery.
"This is something I'm going to have to deal with for the rest of my life. It's not just going to disappear," Straight said.
The numbers game
The number of injuries in recent years has added to the already large need to draw many team members from the student body. The rowing team recruits on campus just like club sports and campus organizations. An average year brings in 40 to 50 girls, but only one or two walk-ons per class usually make it through the program for four years.
Many walk-ons decide the experience is not worth the commitment of 20 to 30 hours per week.
"You look at your friends who aren't rowing, and they have so much fun," said senior Francesca Polvere, a walk-on who left the team last season. "And this is for a sport that most people don't even know we have."
While the program expects to lose a certain number of walk-ons culled from the general student population, a number of recruited and scholarship athletes have also left the program, citing reasons ranging from injury to a poor rowing culture to clashes with coaches. Horner said some prospects may have taken advantage of the program's need for numbers to gain admission to the school as a recruited athlete without having the necessary commitment to stick with the sport.
"We've had good retention with our scholarship kids, but we have not had great retention with our kids that we're recruiting but not providing scholarships for," she said. "So it's a matter of us doing a better job of weeding out kids that just want to come to Duke versus kids that want to come to Duke and actually want to row for four years."
Regardless of the reasons for the departures, it raises the question of the sustainability of success for a program that has such a high turnover rate. Last year, the varsity team had five girls quit, several of whom would have likely played important roles on this year's squad. And after eight seasons as a varsity sport, the program is still struggling with depth-the Blue Devils' varsity squad is still roughly 15 rowers smaller than Virginia's.
And if that trend continues, the program may indeed never be able to get up out of the water.
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