30th Annual Charlie Butt Scullers Head of the Potomac - Register now!

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Ms. Samantha Byrd, chair of Potomac Boat Club’s Regatta Committee, is proud to announce that the 30th Annual Charlie Butt Scullers Head of the Potomac (SHOP) will be held this year on Sunday, September 26.

The regatta is held in memory and honor of legendary rowing coach, Charlie Butt.

Once considered a tune up regatta for the Head of the Charles held in mid-October, today the SHOP includes more than 40 sweep and sculling events, and is considered its own milestone on the fall racing calendar.

To register, please visit the Scullers Head of the Potomac online registration area on Ronin Racing. Entries must be received by Saturday, September 11, 2010, to avoid the late fee. Please note that once registration closes on Saturday, September 18, 2010, it’s closed. There will be no race day registration this year.

Still have a question about the SHOP? Please send it to our Regatta Committee at headofthepotomac@gmail.com.

The Charlie Butt Scullers Head of the Potomac is a true test of physical endurance and mental toughness for sweep crews and scullers alike. Don’t miss a chance to race down one of the Nation’s most historic rivers!

PBC Men’s Sweep Practice Becomes Rescue Effort

At 6:30 am, there was already too much traffic upstream and Potomac Boat Club’s Men’s Sweep Team wanted to get in a decent technical row before leaving for Masters National Rowing Championships this week.  So, Marco Bovo, coach of the team, decided to do something different and started practice downstream instead.

Marco followed the PBC men’s eight and four as they warmed up close to the Virginia shoreline and rounded Theodore Roosevelt Island. About 150 meters from Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, Marco stopped the crews so they could hydrate before doing a few race starts.

Marta Ulbricht, cox of the four, and Tiffany Dao, cox of the eight, pointed their boats through an arch and awaited direction.  But when Marco signaled for the crews to start up again, Marta seemed uncharacteristically distracted.  Marco rushed over to see what was wrong.  As he approached, he saw two men on the bridge yelling and pointing to the water, so he rushed to the spot instead.  Suddenly, it was clear … someone had jumped.

Once Marco got there, he saw a woman just beneath the surface and tried to pull her limp body out of the  water.  Marta and Tiffany moved their boats closer to the spot, and Leo Hergenroeder, bow of the four, and Tim Baxter, bow of the eight, jumped in and swam over to help.

At the same time, the guys in the eight and four yelled up to the men on the bridge to call 911 and advise emergency personnel to meet them at the Thompson Boat Center.  Marco, Leo and Tim had managed to get the woman onto the launch, and Leo and Tim climbed aboard to keep her from rolling back into the river.

The eight and four headed to Thompson’s to meet Marco, Leo, and Tim on the dock and help get the woman out of the launch safely.  Once on the dock, Leo stayed next to the woman and spoke to her to keep her awake until paramedics arrived.

Bob Price, PBC president, who rowed stroke seat of the eight this morning, said, “I can’t tell you how proud I am of everyone. Marta is young, still in high school, but she showed a tremendous amount of maturity and common sense by not starting her crew and in getting Marco’s attention.  Marco went into instant rescue mode, and was trying to pull the woman out before we even knew what was going on.  Leo and Tim didn’t hesitate to jump in to help Marco get the woman into the launch.  And Leo’s actions on the dock probably made another critical difference in saving her life.”

Well, a pretty impressive way to spend your morning, guys! Congratulations on a job well-done to our PBC heroes, Marco, Marta, Leo and Tim, and the rest of the Men’s Sweep Team, who acted swiftly and courageously to save a life.

To the woman in the water, we wish you strength in your recovery, and to your family, the best of all things in the future.

Finally, that life ring in our logo makes sense.

You’re invited: USRowing Town Hall Meeting on Mandatory Membership

In a tough economy and with many rowers and rowing programs operating on the slimmest of budgets, participants in our sport have started to question the cost of a USRowing membership and its value. In his August 2010 letter to the rowing community, chief executive officer of USRowing, Glenn Merry, outlined several of the issues associated with a proposed mandatory membership in USRowing. Thus far, formal and informal discussions on the subject have been heated.

This fall, USRowing will hold a series of town hall meetings to gather input from the community on the subject of mandatory membership and other related issues. The first one scheduled for the Mid-Atlantic Region is on Tuesday, August 17, at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria.

More meeting details are below, followed by a reprint of Glen Merry’s letter. Whatever your opinion might be, this is your moment to be heard and to influence the direction of our sport. Please consider attending. (Not mandatory.)

Tuesday, August 17
7:00-9:00 p.m.
Thomas Jefferson High School
6560 Braddock Road
Alexandria, VA 22312-2297

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A Letter from the CEO, USRowing (August 2010)

Recently, there have been animated discussions taking place in the rowing community about USRowing membership, its value and its cost. The debate should elicit many thoughts.

As I reviewed how other sports handle their membership, I found that most provide the same general benefits: insurance, newsletters, discounts, information, competitions, rules, safety programs and perhaps a magazine. The major national governing bodies (sports like triathlon, swimming, gymnastics and volleyball) have mandatory requirements for individual membership. If you participate in the sport, you pay to do so. USRowing does not currently require individual membership for the sport of rowing.

Why do most [National Governing Bodies] (NGBs) mandate membership? In many cases, it has been driven by risk and insurance. Frankly, anyone participating in a sport, from the novice to the Olympian, adds to the perceived liability risk, and it is more economical for everyone when an NGB shops a policy that covers all of the exposure rather than have each team, club or person to do so on their own. In conjunction with this, the NGB then provides the infrastructure to safely run the sport, things like rules, referees, coaching education and safety regulations.

For two decades, USRowing has not mandated individual membership. This was not always the case. When I rowed in college in the late 1980s, everyone was a member of USRowing. The change took place in 1990, kind of. USRowing dropped individual requirements, but the requirement shifted to organizations. If a club participated in registered regattas, then it had to be part of the structure.

Fast-forward 20 years. The sport has grown to five times the size. We had three major accidents in the mid-2000s where rowers died, changing our perceived risk. Insurance premiums quadrupled. Organizational dues reformed into tiered insurance categories. The sport survived, and five years later, we are out the other side. But, we need to think about our structure moving forward.

During the past decade, the sport has grown by a factor of three. We are now pushing up against constraints of an aged system from an era that supported the 30,000 who rowed in 1989, not the 150,000 active participants of today. Much of the recent growth in our sport has been driven by the NCAA and its addition of women’s rowing to its program. This, in turn, has pushed the growth of high school rowing. High school rowing has exploded into thousands of participants and hundreds of regattas annually.

As this growth occurred outside the control and stewardship of USRowing, some of these growth areas have not paid proportionally into the infrastructure of the sport. We also face other issues of rapid growth such as the deficit of experienced quality coaches. Programs are faced with hiring “coaches,” many of whom have only the experience of being an interested parent or having rowed for three or four years. Do these issues seem like a sustainable model for a safe and professional sport?

I would argue that the answer is no.

Currently, 16,500 individuals pay into the system that supports the entire rowing population. It’s true that the 1,050 organizational members also pay dues of $350, but we are not seeing the scalable support required to take rowing to the next level. In addition, we have no idea the exact scope of the sport, and we need to know this in order to assess our combined risk, attract and activate new sponsors and appropriately program services.

It has been rumored that USRowing is planning to take over the sport, to mandate individual membership. In some regard, we aren’t taking it over – we are the sport. Love us or hate us, we provide the backdrop for the sport to exist (albeit we could do a better job in many areas). Where would we row without liability insurance, referees, rules, safety standards, or basic coaching education? The better rumor that I am starting is that USRowing seeks to become a better NGB. We want every rower to support a system and organization that fulfills his or her needs as a member.

So that takes us to mandatory membership. It has to happen to survive and to meet the growth of our community. What mandatory membership will look like is still up for debate. What we offer to our members needs to be redesigned. But, we are at the beginning of this conversation, with the target of January 2013 to roll out a finished product.

Let’s open the conversation about mandatory membership by describing some common models for consideration. Set aside the issue of how much dues cost right now; we will address that in relation to the value of services rendered to the members. There are two primary models commonly used to implement mandatory membership by NGBs. The first is a direct model where every individual joins and pays his or her dues directly to the NGB. This is close to what we do now with our full-privileged members. The NGB then provides regattas and clubs a roster of eligible members that can participate and compete. USA Swimming uses such a model, with about 400,000 members. The second model is indirect, where an individual is a member via his or her organization. Each athlete pays dues to the organization, and the organization then submits its roster to the NGB with funds to balance its account. USA Curling uses such a model and has about 15,000 members.

The current system used by USRowing is a hybrid of the two models. We have non-privileged members who sign waivers and are part of USRowing through their clubs, but without paying dues and without USRowing gaining access to their information. Our full-privileged membership is used by the 16,000 who have typically raced at one of the USRowing-owned regattas such as a national championship, or by those who want to receive the yearbook and newsletters.

There are some pros and cons to both systems and perhaps a hybrid is necessary for USRowing to meet all of the needs of our community. However, the current hybrid needs to be revised, so that we more actively engage those members coming indirectly through their organizations.

Now turn your attention to the issue of value and cost. Let’s assume for the purpose of this example that the status quo is sufficient for the service and programs provided by USRowing. If it is an accurate assumption that there are 150,000 active rowers and we keep USRowing’s expenses relatively the same as they are now (no new programs, some build-out costs for automated member systems, add someone to answer the increased calls and e-mail, etc.), then one could project a drop in individual dues by a significant amount. Five times as many people paying into the current system could result in half the dues per person.

But let’s take this to another level. What if we said that USRowing should be better (and it really should be.) We should offer new programs, say for example … a recruiting clearing house for youth members and college coaches, advanced coaching education systems, masters rowing camps and real marketing tools for clubs to recruit and engage their local communities. What would that look like? What would that cost with 150,000 rowers paying into that system? Could we do those things and others while reducing the per-person cost of dues?

I believe this is a conversation that we must have. We must address the question, “Is USRowing good enough.” This is the conversation USRowing is beginning with focus groups like the newly formed youth task force. We also will bring this conversation to the people in the rowing community through town hall meetings this fall at local boathouses nationwide.

When the board hired me in 2005 as the new CEO, USRowing was precipitously perched at the edge of collapse. We had run year after year of overspending. Our cash reserves were spent, and our balance sheet was a disaster. Our governance was out of date. We lacked revenue diversity. We were an unstable organization. I have spent the last four years rebuilding the internal structures and stabilizing the association with the help of the board and key stakeholders such as the NRF. We are no longer in triage mode, attempting to keep the association alive. It is time to move forward to not only assure that our sport has a future, but to create a robust future.

I have taken some criticism recently for again asking for input from the members and the community on these issues. It has been said that people have already screamed about what is wrong with USRowing, and how could I not know by now. It’s true that I have heard complaints about USRowing from some key individuals year after year. I guess what I wonder is if the people who have been screaming the loudest really represent what’s best for the masses of rowers or if they are just the loudest one-issue complainers?

I have to admit that after 24 years in the sport and five years in this role, I am more interested in hearing from, and working with, people who want to make USRowing better, stronger and fresher than those who revel in pointing out our missteps.

As I wrote earlier, we are about to embark on a series of town hall membership meetings nationally. If you would like to host a meeting at your boathouse, contact me and let me know. You can reach me at 609-751-0701 or glenn@usrowing.org.

PBC PayPal Users: All Clear. PayPal today!

Update (August 2, 2010):  All of you anxiously waiting to pay your annual dues via PayPal, please disregard the message below and go for it. We have been cleared to PayPal.

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Our Treasurer, Tom Stork, has an important message for PBC PayPal users: Hold off on using PayPal to pay your dues or if you can, use a good old fashioned check.

Last week, we learned that the IRS has required PayPal to supply proof that tax-exempt organizations, like PBC, with low to no fee types of accounts, are in fact tax-exempt before they will allow PayPal to continue to service these accounts.  Tom is sending PayPal the information they need regarding our tax-exempt status, and plans to have the situation resolved shortly.

In the meantime, if you would like to pay your dues by check, simply make it out to Treasurer, Potomac Boat Club, then mail it to Tom Stork at Potomac Boat Club, 3530 Water St. NW, Washington, DC 20007, or leave it in an envelope in the Treasurer’s slot under the logbook.

We’ll let you know as soon as you can start using PayPal, again!

Thanks!

Excessive heat warning for DC metro!

Be smart in the heat, PBC!!!

An Excessive Heat Warning has been issued for the Washington Metropolitan area from noon until 10:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 24, 2010. The Heat Index may reach 110 degrees.

Visit the Centers for Disease Control web site for the warning signs of heat exhaustion and what you can do about it at http://www.bt.cdc.gov/disasters/extremeheat/faq.asp.

Those racing tomorrow up at Diamond State Masters regatta in DE, drink lots of water throughout the day.  Heed the early warning signs of heat exhaustion and dehydration.  Try to stay in the shade when you’re not racing, and GOOD LUCK!

It’s Spring 2010. Finally!

Just when you thought we were living in Buffalo, spring arrives!  The four-oar rule has been lifted, the Annual Meeting is around the corner, and W-L is already one deep in its race schedule … with a few wins, too!

With more people starting to use the club again, I wanted to send out the following safety tips, etiquette reminders, and general housekeeping practices, to get us all on the same page and safely into the spring season:

- If you haven’t yet signed up for your new access code, please contact security@potomacstar.com to set up your new code.

- Early spring also means it’s still dark in the morning and early evening when many of us get out on the water.  All shells must carry white lights fore and aft, before sunrise and after sunset.  There are lights available by the logbook.  Use them!  Also make yourself easy to see by wearing light, reflective colors.

- Remember to follow the proper traffic patterns, and know where those rocks are … even when the buoys aren’t!

- When you’re finished erging, please wipe the machine and the surrounding floor area clean.  I recently noticed many of our newest ergs with very filthy tracks … makes it feel like the seat is rolling on a gravel road.  If you don’t find paper towels in the ballroom, then find some in the bathroom.  If we’re out, then be creative – don’t just leave a mess behind.

- And, finally, I couldn’t do one of these things without my usual in-one-ear-and-out-the-other reminder (to the Men, at least) to PLEASE take your post-workout gear home with you.  We just completed the floor renovation in the back locker room and it smells much better back there - - don’t let your nasty gear hang around and ruin it.   Soon we’ll be going through and clearing out the junk on top of the lockers, so if any of it is yours, please remove it now.

After two blizzards and a flood, we’re due some quality water time, aren’t we?  Respect the club and fellow members, respect the river and be safe.

Thanks.  And see you at the Annual Meeting on April 7th!

Bob

Bob Price
President, Potomac Boat Club

We have a date! PBC Annual Meeting, April 7th

On Wednesday, April 7, Potomac Boat Club will hold its 144th Annual Meeting.  If you’re like us, you’re probably asking yourself … 144th?  How did 144 annual meetings happen in a span of 140 years? But if you’re normal, and without a lot of time on your hands, you’re probably just wondering whether or not you really have to be there. The answer?  Yes.  You do.

Here is the schedule of important events:

• 6:30 - 7:30 PM - Social Hour (a.k.a. Happy Hour … you know, with food and drinks and stuff)

• 7:30 – 9:30 PM - Elections (senior members vote on three Board seats and Officers), Committee Reports and Other Business

Okay, the truth is, you don’t have to be there … but you should be. We make much better decisions when you’re around.

See you soon!

First update to PBC Bylaws in 30 years

To: Members of Potomac Boat Club
From: Ed Ryan, Club Secretary

I am pleased to announce that the Board has updated the Bylaws of the Club for the first time since their last revision more than 30 years ago. The newly updated Bylaws can be found on the PBC website in the Members Area section and in the Members Only Info area of the Potomac Star (both areas are passcode protected).

The primary changes to the Bylaws were made to eliminate provisions that the Board determined were no longer relevant or applicable (availability of purchase option for life membership and waiver of initiation fee for active members of other rowing clubs); to update the fees and dues referenced in the Bylaws to those that are currently payable; to institute the use of a Club Bulletin Board for posting of Club information (contact information, fees, dues, etc.) and other official notices from the Secretary; to correct the descriptions of the Club uniform and flag; and to institute an improved mechanism to ensure early member notification of any proposed changes in fees or dues. Other changes included many “clean up” and ministerial changes to correct typos and the like.

Please note that the new Bylaws are effective as of December 16th, 2009, but are effective on a prospective basis only. As for any matter predating December 16th, 2009, the former Bylaws are effective (including the waiver of initiation fees for active members of other rowing clubs).

I hope the revised Bylaws will work for the Club for at least another 30 years.

Ed Ryan
Secretary, Potomac Boat Club

Security reminder from the president

Hi All –

A recent locker room theft reminds us that despite significant improvements in house security, we must continue to take reasonable precautions to secure our belongings while at the club.

This particular theft was from an unlocked locker.  Please make sure you are locking your locker and closing doors behind you.  As an added measure, don’t be shy about questioning anyone you don’t recognize.

It’s unfortunate we have to be on guard at our own club, but if we remember to do these simple things, we will continue to increase the level of safety and security for all of us.

Bob Price
President, PBC

Brrrr … 4-Oar Rule starts today!

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