Long & Low wrote:
snip
And if you are going to use the LM4x to support your position against clubs you have to defend decades of losing while touring Europe for the summer in the LM4-. They are both bad club programs. The one with sweeps is sponsored by US Rowing. The one with sculls is limited by US Rowing.
Why is it you insist on staying. You know they don't want you.
US Rowing doesn't limit anything. There's no heavy men's double in the Olys and there's nothing that US Rowing or the nat'l camp has done to prevent a few really talented athletes and a quality coach from putting together a campaign to win a medal.
There are lots of things preventing that from happening, oh like, money to pay a coach, the means for these quality athletes to train professionally, and an overall program where they have confidence their success is only limited by their talent and will.
US Rowing doesn't prevent a Seattle or Newport or CRC or Penn AC, or Craftsbury, or OKC from doing just that.
The problem is that the resources are too scant, such that they are concentrated more on the camp system. Even those
are pathetic. Thus you have last decade and before, good small boat would arise out of Penn (of previous rejects) and get poached to go to Princeton, instead of them flipping them off and continuing to plan to race for a pair medal.
This is why I continue to say, it's not the selection method, be it camps, trials, combinations, whatever. Swimming and track are having their Oly trials right now. Some would say that this is not a good time to be doing this, what a few
weeks before? Peak twice with a fortnight in between?
But the talent level is so high, and support adequate for enough athletes, that if you check yesterday's results, looks to me like the best ones are making the team, and have prepared themselves well. HOLYF****, Brendan Hansen's back again.
As Stewie alluded to, selection is antithetical to development. The USA selects like crazy, but we do not develop. We don't teach elite ppl how to row, and especially how to race small boats.