The 1937 Poughkeepsie Regatta capped a season in which the Washington Huskies rowing team reaffirmed its dominance, then brought the careers of three central oarsmen to a close. On June 22, Washington’s freshmen and junior varsity won their races, and the varsity followed with a four-length victory, a new course record, and a second consecutive sweep of the regatta. For Joe Rantz, Roger Morris, and Shorty Hunt, it was the last race of four collegiate seasons in which they had never been defeated.

The contest behind the contest

By the 1920s and 1930s, collegiate crew ranked among the country’s most closely followed sports. Major regattas drew crowds and national press coverage, and millions of fans followed crews through their training and racing seasons. Poughkeepsie, the setting of the Intercollegiate Rowing Association’s regatta, had become one of the sport’s great annual spectacles. In 1929, as many as 125,000 spectators attended in person, while millions more listened to radio coverage.

That national prominence had long been associated with eastern colleges. For much of the early twentieth century, eastern crews dominated the regatta, and the center of American collegiate rowing remained among institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Ithaca, and Annapolis. Western programs faced the additional burden of the cost of transporting crews and delicate racing shells across the country. When they did make the journey, their rowers met curiosity and condescension as well as competition: eastern audiences were accustomed to seeing the sons of the powerful, not farmers, fishermen, and lumberjacks, in the boats.

Washington’s earlier breakthrough helped alter that imbalance. In 1923, its varsity narrowly beat Navy at Poughkeepsie for the West’s first Intercollegiate Rowing Association victory. The win established that a western crew could prevail at the eastern regatta, but it did not remove the financial and social obstacles faced by western programs. The 1937 sweep therefore carried a significance beyond the winning margin: Washington was again demonstrating, on the sport’s most storied stage, that its crews belonged at the center of collegiate rowing.

A season reaching its final race

After the 1936 Olympics, the rowers returned to the University of Washington for the 1936–37 season. By mid-October, Bobby Moch had graduated magna cum laude and joined Al Ulbrickson as an assistant coach; the other members of the crew were back in the boat. The following spring, on April 17, Washington met California on the Oakland Estuary and won by five lengths. The day’s newspaper headlines paired the crew race with Seabiscuit’s appearance at Tanforan Racetrack, setting two sporting contests on opposite sides of the bay alongside one another. Washington’s victory was a substantial lead-up to the national championship, but the final test at Poughkeepsie still lay ahead.

The 1937 race was also the end of a long course of preparation for the returning seniors. Royal Brougham calculated on a bar napkin that Rantz, Morris, and Hunt had each rowed approximately 4,344 miles during four years of college rowing—far enough, he observed, to travel from Seattle to Japan. Their labor had been directed toward only 28 miles of collegiate racing. The contrast between thousands of training miles and those comparatively few competitive miles gives the final result its scale: the unbeaten record was built through years of repeated work, not secured in a single afternoon.

The sweep at Poughkeepsie

Washington’s freshmen had already won their race, and the junior varsity had done the same. When the varsity race began, the Washington boat drove down the river and passed Navy at the two-mile mark. Navy and five other crews were left behind as Washington continued to widen its advantage. The varsity finished four lengths ahead, set a new course record, and completed the second consecutive sweep of the Poughkeepsie Regatta—a sweep in which all three Washington crews won their events.

The scale of the accomplishment was recognized by Jim Ten Eyck of Syracuse, one of the oldest and most experienced coaches in the sport. After the race, he said, “It’s the greatest eight I ever saw, and I never expect to see another like it.” The judgment was striking not only because of the victory but because it came from a coach who had watched crews compete since 1861. The new course record and the victories across all three races gave his praise a setting in concrete results: Washington had not merely won the varsity contest but dominated the regatta as a whole.

The last race and its aftermath

Poughkeepsie was the final race for Rantz, Morris, and Hunt. In four years of collegiate competition, over a total of approximately 28 racing miles, none had ever been defeated. The end of their rowing careers did not arrive with another contest or a further challenge; it came the day after the victory, as the crew left the shell house. Brougham watched from a distance as the eight oarsmen quietly shook hands and departed on different paths. He wrote that “the crew that is hailed as the finest rowing combination of all time passed into history.” The understatement of the scene—the handshakes, then separation—stands against the scale of what the record described.

The regatta thus closed two histories at once. Washington’s sweep confirmed the continuing force of its program in a competition long shaped by eastern prestige and western disadvantage. For the three graduating rowers, the record ended undefeated; for the crew as a whole, its final appearance became an occasion for later generations to remember. The championship was both a competitive conclusion and the point at which a remarkable combination of athletes ceased to exist as a racing crew.