One Year

Today marks one year since the first post on Fight in the Dog. Since that time we’ve seen the best racing women’s lightweight rowing has to give as more dedicated programs have come on the scene and parity looks achievable. Unfortunately, the sport has also faced one of the largest threats ever to its existence.

FITD began like most blogs, read only by its author. It slowly grew until by the end of the spring season it had readers from teams around the country, including all of the top 10 programs. The first reader who ever contacted me was a former Georgia Tech rower who began to spread the word with a link from her own blog. The first team I knew to read FITD was UCF. Rowers, coaches, parents, and regatta officials have all contacted me about women’s lightweight rowing at some point over the life of FITD. Those who have read and commented on this site are simply proof that women’s lightweight rowing is alive and vibrant in the US. True, there are those involved with women’s rowing who couldn’t be bothered enough to answer my questions about lightweights, and there are those who desperately wish this blog didn’t exist. In the end, though, rowers of all weights and sexes recognize that we all share a love of the same sport, we all take the same strokes, over the same distance, and experience the same pain in the pursuit of perfection. We are all the same.

Not too long ago, a reader posted a comment in which she said that there was nothing on FITD that you couldn’t find on row2k. I have to admit that stung a bit, probably because I had just finished a series of posts that mostly consisted of race results. It did get me wondering, however, just what I might have written about that was new and informative to lightweights. Here are some things I could think of:

- FITD was the first to report to a wide audience (outside of the conference) that the Pac 10 was pushing for a NCAA championship for heavyweight men.

- FITD was the first to publish a Q&A with the NCAA on women’s lightweights

- FITD was the first to report on the 2006 IRA weigh-in requirements

- FITD was the first to do a study of the number of lightweight programs

- FITD is the only place you’ll see eating disorders and lightweight rowing discussed without a politically correct bias

- FITD is the only place to find an ongoing discussion of how the NCAA affects lightweight rowing

- FITD is the only place you’ll find a discussion of why there aren’t more lightweight programs

- FITD was the first to do a post-season ranking of V8s

- FITD was the only place to find race reports of lightweight women’s races

- FITD is the only place to find an analysis of lightweight vs. heavyweight race times

- FITD is the only to place to find season previews for women’s lightweight programs

- FITD was the first to call out the Rowing News on its lack of women’s lightweight coverage in its season preview issue

There was other unique information on FITD but perhaps the biggest scoop was also the one that stimulated the most negative feedback – the IRA dam opening. Of all the outlets reporting on the IRAs no one else was alert enough (or cared enough) to recognize aberrant results and look for the cause. In some quarters FITD will be forever despised for making a lot of people look silly.

As the summer flies by (teams will be back to school next month), lightweights with national team ambitions are testing themselves at U23 trials, Nationals, and Canadian Henley and will provide leadership to their teams and the sport in the fall. Like all major endeavors, progress for women’s lightweights will come in fits and starts. Much progress was made last season, but who knows what will happen this coming season? The trend in dedicated programs is up, in quality of crews is higher, and in parity is more. The 2007 season should be better than the last. More crews than ever have shown they are fast, and more crews than ever believe they can win. As Georgetown and UCF have shown, the top five slots of the national poll are no longer safe. There will always be threats to lightweight rowing, but the best way to fight them off is for more women to row harder, row faster, and row smarter. I firmly believe that will happen, just as I believe the best days of women’s lightweight rowing are yet to come.

“The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.”