University of Washington

The University of Washington is the setting and institutional force behind the book’s account of a crew that rose from freshman competition to national championships and the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Its rowing program joined athletes, coaches, campus resources, public attention, and community fundraising in a shared effort: the crew’s achievements became a source of university and regional identity, even as the athletes’ limited means made each opportunity to compete a practical challenge.

Campus and institutional setting

The book first presents the University of Washington through its setting on a bluff above Lake Washington. On a day when the clouds over Seattle began to part, sunlight reached students on the grassy quadrangle in front of the university’s new stone library. The campus scene places university life within sight of the lake that would become the rowing program’s working landscape: classes, student leisure, and athletic labor occupy the same institutional space.

The university also figures as an educational home for students whose paths into rowing did not resemble those of the traditionally privileged eastern crews. Al Ulbrickson, the rowing program’s head coach, had grown up in modest circumstances in the Montlake district and on Mercer Island. To attend Franklin High School, he rowed a small boat two miles across to Seattle and back each day for four years. At the University of Washington, he found challenge in both the classroom and crew; after graduating in 1926, he was hired as freshman coach and later became head coach. His trajectory tied the program’s authority to local experience and to a coach who had himself developed through the university’s academic and athletic life.

The rowing program and its discipline

Under Ulbrickson, the University of Washington’s rowing program was presented as exacting and closely organized. Ulbrickson’s formal manner—he appeared at the shell house in a dark three-piece suit and fedora, with a Phi Beta Kappa key—helped establish the distinction between coach and athletes. His attention to detail and businesslike bearing made the program’s standards visible before a crew even took to the water.

The demands of rowing gave that discipline a collective purpose. In a racing shell, each athlete’s movements depend on the others: a lapse by one rower can upset the stroke’s tempo, the boat’s balance, and the crew’s prospects. The book contrasts this interdependence with sports in which a team may still win while an individual star is having a poor day. For the University of Washington crews, concentration and coordination were not abstract virtues; every pull had to fit the work of the other rowers.

The program’s development is traced through successive crews and seasons. Joe Rantz and the other candidates for the freshman crew encountered the university’s rowing world when they tried out in the fall of 1933. In one freshman race, Rantz occupied the number three seat and Roger Morris the number seven seat. The two-mile contest, rowed into a north breeze after five and a half months of training, made the crew’s preparation answerable to the water and to the combined effort of its eight oarsmen. Tom Bolles, the freshman coach, privately registered the significance of the crew’s time on his stopwatch, while withholding it from the press.

Rivalry, reputation, and access

The University of Washington’s rowing ambitions grew within a national sport whose prestige and resources were unevenly distributed. In the 1920s and 1930s, collegiate rowing drew extensive press attention and large crowds. Eastern colleges, shaped by elite British models, supplied oarsmen to prominent universities and dominated the sport’s established centers. The University of Washington and the University of California at Berkeley, by contrast, were large public universities whose crews had struggled for funding and recognition, even at home.

Their rivalry, dating to 1903, helped build a western audience. Students, alumni, and local residents turned out for the annual April races, while each program sought standing against eastern institutions as well as against the other. Yet the western schools’ coaches received only a fraction of eastern coaches’ salaries, and the programs had virtually no wealthy patrons or money for recruitment. Royal Brougham saw the possibility that the center of American rowing might shift west, bringing recognition to Seattle; he also understood that California might claim that position instead.

The costs of national competition made this disparity tangible. The Intercollegiate Rowing Association’s regatta at Poughkeepsie, held on a four-mile stretch of the Hudson River, had become the country’s most prestigious collegiate crew event after its establishment in 1895. Western participation required expensive transportation for crews and delicate shells. When western teams did travel east, they faced a reception that ranged from curiosity to condescension and derision. The book emphasizes the social contrast between the eastern spectators’ expectations of sons of powerful families and the western crews’ backgrounds among farmers, fishermen, and lumberjacks. The university’s competitive record therefore carried a challenge not just to rival crews but to assumptions about who belonged in the sport’s most prominent settings.

Olympic ambition and the cost of success

As the Olympic year approached, the university’s goals and training changed. Ulbrickson announced that the crews would row hard from the outset of winter quarter rather than spend the opening weeks concentrating more cautiously on technique. He also planned to race athletes in set crews, with higher stakes than in a routine season. By September, he was telling reporters that Washington’s oarsmen would keep the Olympic trials in mind from the start of fall training, although he acknowledged the difficulty of winning the right to represent the United States in Berlin. In January, he warned those preparing for varsity turnout to expect the most demanding crew season the university had attempted.

The route to Berlin ran through a sequence of costly competitions. Ulbrickson first hoped that victories over California at the Pacific Coast Regatta on Lake Washington would persuade Seattle residents to finance sending all three university boats to Poughkeepsie. The varsity would then have to compete at Princeton; success there would make a trip to Berlin possible, but further qualifying races and the Olympic final would still remain. The university’s athletic ambition depended on results, but also on securing money for each stage.

That dependence became urgent after the Washington crew qualified at Princeton. The American Olympic Committee faced a shortage of funds, and other athletes were being asked to pay some or all of their own travel costs. Ulbrickson was stunned by the prospect that the winning crew might not be sent to the games. The university had already scraped together the money to send the boys east, while the rowers themselves could not meet the additional expense. They were working-class athletes, not heirs able to underwrite an Olympic journey.

The response made the university’s relationship with its surrounding community part of the team’s Olympic story. Donations came from businesses, small establishments, individual contributors, and the athletes’ hometowns. Seattle’s contribution began with $500 from The Seattle Times; further amounts included $5 from the Hide-Away Beer Parlor, $50 from Standard Oil, and $1 from an anonymous donor. Sequim sent $75, while other hometowns raised money for their own rowers. Volunteers sold $1,523 in fifty-cent tags on the first day, and a $5,000 certified check followed from the chairman of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. The crew became, in practical terms, a shared undertaking of the university and the communities whose pride its victories had stirred.

Legacy within the university

The Washington crew’s Olympic qualification transformed its standing. The press increasingly treated the athletes as possible candidates for the greatest collegiate crew of their time, while Seattle celebrated the prospect of appearing on the world stage. The victory at Poughkeepsie had already produced national attention: the varsity’s come-from-behind win was described as historic, and commentators singled out Bobby Moch’s handling of the race. These judgments enlarged the significance of the university’s program beyond its own campus and regional rivalry.

The connection between the crew and the institution continued after the Olympic season. Joe Rantz returned to a house on Lake Washington, delivered the crew’s awarded oak sapling to the university, and saw it planted near the shell house. The original tree eventually died after being transplanted several times, a loss that troubled him late in life. In 2008, a replacement oak was planted near the Conibear Shellhouse; Judy placed nine shovelfuls of soil around it, one for each of the boys. The gesture made the university grounds a site of remembrance, joining a living tree to the crew’s collective identity.

The rowing program’s institutional continuity also appears in the careers of its coaches. Ulbrickson remained at the University of Washington for another twenty-three years, with varsity crews winning six Intercollegiate Rowing Association titles and junior varsity crews winning ten. He entered the National Rowing Hall of Fame in 1956. When he discussed retirement in 1959, he recalled among the first highlights the day in 1936 when he put Rantz in his Olympic boat and watched it take off. The memory locates the program’s larger history in a specific decision: the university’s celebrated crew was built through the work of individual athletes, but its meaning endured through the institution that trained, sent, and remembered them.