OG&E NightSprints 2024 Coxswain Video ‐ Co-Ed Experienced 8+

This is a 500m sprint race with a team of adult athletes who practice once a week for a 12-week season. The boat includes rowers with a wide variety of experience levels. After a collision within the first few strokes forced the race to restart, we won by 1 second!
STEERING: My steering is decent here. I spend a lot of time centered well in the lane, but there are also some moments where I end up closer to one buoy line or the other. Because we were so close to our competition I needed to be looking left and right constantly, but that also meant I had to keep looking forward to make sure I was still situated between the buoy lines. When I'm on an outside lane I tend to keep my gaze towards the rest of the field and gauge the distance of one side's blades off of one buoy line, but when you're in the middle lane I don't think there's really a way around alternately looking left, right, and center. The bladework was also fairly messy (not our best technical performance as a crew, but we got the job done) so who knows, a lot of factors could have contributed to why we veered from the center a few times.
CALLS: As is typical for me, after the race I couldn't remember much of what I'd said during it. I feared I'd spent too much time focused on the positioning of other boats (though when you're that close to the field, you kind of have to) and hadn't managed to provide any useful technical calls. I thought if I'd devoted more calls to cleaning up the rowing, that would have been more useful than just yelling about where we were and telling the rowers to keep pushing. Towards the end we had a couple near-crabs that could have cost us the race, so maybe I could have incorporated a call about the focus our coach had this season on keeping a good grip on our handles. Upon listening back to the video though, I'm not as displeased as I was from just the memory of my performance. The rowers told me they liked the call "push" and I was kicking myself for not incorporating it at all, but when I listen back I hear that I did!
START: I think I executed the start well in terms of reminding the rowers to be calm. In practice we'd had trouble bringing the rate down after our starts, so we'd planned a possible "second lengthen" move that I chose not to deploy in the race because of how close we were to the other competitors. I think the high 10 and the lengthen incorporated good, brief technical calls to address the issues we were having with timing, and even watching this back without any boat feel at my disposal, I like how our lengthen looks.
BODY: I probably should have separated out some of my technical calls, rather than dumping a bunch of disparate reminders over the course of one stroke each, which I did at a couple points. I don't think variations on "find us" are a useful call-I think I mean something about timing but I don't feel that we had enough discussions in practice for that call to make sense; I should have just said timing. At the 200 to go mark, I should have backed up my "make a move" call with a technical focus that the rowers could act on. I count out 2 strokes but it's not clear what they're supposed to be doing in response except continuing to row. I think I kept to the race plan fairly well by executing the sprint around the final 150m (really I should have just made that prior move the start of the sprint, since those calls came almost back to back). As the race progresses I think my voice is appropriately reflecting the intensity of the situation and encouraging the rowers that their efforts are resulting in walking through the other boats.
8 Deena
7 Trevor
6 Sam
5 Kari
4 Diana
3 Mike
2 Domingo
1 Tyler
📍 Oklahoma River in Oklahoma City, OK