Washington Huskies rowing team

The Washington Huskies rowing team was both a competitive college program and a vehicle for establishing the standing of western rowing. Its ascent—from a modest operation on Lake Washington to the crew selected for the 1936 Olympic Games—was built through hard racing, coaching decisions, and the support of a city that had to help pay for its athletes to compete. The team’s history also exposed the unequal resources and class conventions that shaped American collegiate rowing.

Identity and the collegiate rowing landscape

In the 1920s and 1930s, collegiate crew drew crowds and press coverage on a scale comparable to baseball and college football. The sport’s center of influence, however, remained in the East, among universities whose rowing traditions were associated with elite private schools and wealthy supporters. Washington’s program had begun in comparatively unpromising circumstances: when Royal Brougham arrived at the Post-Intelligencer in 1910, the crew was a handful of rough-and-tumble country boys rowing Lake Washington in leaky, tub-shaped shells, coached by the red-haired Hiram Conibear. The program improved, but for years it received little recognition outside the West Coast.

The team’s fortunes were bound to the rivalry between the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley, which dated to 1903. Both were large public universities whose crews struggled for campus funding and recognition before achieving occasional success against eastern opponents. Their annual April races could draw tens of thousands of students, alumni, and local spectators, but the western programs lacked the recruitment money and well-heeled patrons available elsewhere. Western coaches earned a fraction of eastern salaries, and the western teams mostly raced each other. Brougham saw a successful Washington crew as a way to shift the national attention paid to collegiate rowing toward Seattle—and to prevent that prestige from settling in California instead.

From eastern outsiders to a national champion

The Intercollegiate Rowing Association regatta at Poughkeepsie had become a major national sporting event, attracting as many as 125,000 spectators in 1929 and millions more through radio coverage. Eastern schools dominated it for much of the early twentieth century. Washington first entered the regatta in 1913 under Hiram Conibear. The team did not win, but its third-place finish startled eastern fans and journalists, who had expected little from a rural western crew. The challenge was not only competitive: travel with delicate racing shells was expensive, and eastern audiences often met western rowers with condescension or ridicule, accustomed as they were to seeing the sons of prominent and wealthy families in the boats.

Washington’s breakthrough came in 1923, when its varsity crew returned to Poughkeepsie under head coach Russell “Rusty” Callow. In the final stretch, Washington raced bow to bow with the Navy crew. As the crowd drowned out the coxswain’s commands, Don Grant raised a red flag cut from a Cornell banner to signal the crew to give everything. Stroke oar Dow Walling, suffering from three enormous boils on one leg, raised the rate above forty strokes per minute. Washington narrowly secured the West’s first Intercollegiate Rowing Association victory. After the race, the boys gingerly lifted Walling out of the shell and sent him to the hospital. The astonished crowd asked where Seattle was and whether the Washington rowers were lumberjacks; the boys responded by handing out miniature totem poles. The victory put the program on the national map, but it did not erase the cost or social discomfort of repeated eastern campaigns. For much of the following decade, western schools entered Poughkeepsie only occasionally.

Building the 1936 varsity crew

Under Al Ulbrickson, Washington’s route toward the 1936 Olympics ran through successive competitions rather than a single selection. On March 28, after a sequence of strong training races, he elevated a boat to varsity status and decided it was the crew with which he would pursue Berlin. The boat had come together after changes that included Joe Rantz and Hatch; Ulbrickson’s logbook recorded that the switch had helped. The results soon made the decision difficult to ignore. On March 22, the crew led the other boats from start to finish. The next day it won one race by seven lengths and another by three or four. In a late-spring snowstorm on March 27, it finished three lengths ahead; that afternoon, Don Hume raised the rate to forty in a 2,000-meter sprint, and the crew followed him cleanly.

George Pocock christened the shell for the trials as the Husky Clipper. During the ceremony, he poured a jar of fluid over the bow and explained its German connection with a joke about getting the boat used to Germany: it was sauerkraut juice. On April 4, the crew completed a three-mile time trial in 16:20, beating the existing course record of 16:33.4. They finished upright and breathing easily. Their speed emerged alongside a common discipline: the rowers were tough and determined, but their shared hardships had taught them to subordinate individual egos to the boat. That collective character mattered because the crew’s performance depended on its members moving together, not simply on any one rower’s power.

The California race and the crew’s defining method

The Pacific Coast Regatta against California was a crucial test before the national championships and Olympic trials. Ulbrickson needed a strong showing in Seattle to persuade the city to finance sending all three Washington boats to Poughkeepsie. California, coached by Ky Ebright, was a formidable opponent: its varsity had recorded faster three-mile trial times than Washington’s. In the race, Gene Berkenkamp’s California crew took an early lead, rowing at thirty-five or thirty-six strokes per minute. Washington matched the effort without gaining ground.

Bobby Moch responded by asking Hume to lower the rate to twenty-nine, an apparently counterintuitive decision while California was ahead. The change allowed Washington to find its swing. Hume took long, smooth, deep strokes, and his teammates followed; by the one-mile mark, the crews were level, and Washington began edging ahead. Near the two-mile buoy, California’s shell rolled off keel twice, and missed clean releases disrupted its rhythm. Washington built a three-quarter-length lead. Moch held back even as California raised its rate, then called for Hume to accelerate with half a mile remaining. At thirty-two strokes per minute, the Husky Clipper opened clear water and crossed the line three lengths ahead of the California Clipper. Both crews broke the course record, but Washington’s 15:56.4 was 37 seconds faster than the previous mark. The result established the varsity as exceptional, though it did not settle the larger question: Washington had beaten Ebright’s crews in the Pacific Coast Regatta before and then lost at Poughkeepsie.

Olympic ambition, funding, and significance

The Pacific Coast victory was one step in a demanding sequence. Ulbrickson aimed first to win the races against California, then to take the varsity to Poughkeepsie, and finally to prevail at the Olympic trials in Princeton. Even a victory at the trials would mean more races before the gold-medal contest in Berlin. The crew’s Olympic ambition therefore depended on more than its work on the water: it depended on winning often enough to justify the costs of travel and on finding people willing to meet them.

At Princeton, the financial problem became explicit. Henry Penn Burke told Washington’s coaches and athletic director that the boys would have to pay their own way to Berlin or yield the place to Penn. The American Olympic Committee had a shortage of funds, but Washington’s crew was made up of working-class Americans who could not personally cover the expense. Seattle answered with a rapid public campaign. Volunteers sold fifty-cent tags, local radio appealed for contributions, and donations arrived from businesses, towns, and individual supporters. On the first day, tag sales raised $1,523; by the end of the second, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce chairman had sent Ulbrickson a $5,000 certified check. The team could then prepare to sail for Germany aboard the SS Manhattan, and it became the United States Olympic rowing team.

In Berlin, Washington’s achievement stood within a sport still marked by class boundaries. The Australian crew had been barred from the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley because the regatta excluded men who worked for wages, a rule that classified policemen as labourers. The British Olympic crew, drawn from the prestigious Leander Club and Oxford and Cambridge, represented the established tradition Washington had spent years challenging. Against that background, the Washington Huskies rowing team’s path from underfunded western outsiders to Olympic representatives carried a significance larger than a set of race results: its success required a public university crew, its coaches, its city, and its supporters to act together in a sport whose prestige and access had long been shaped by wealth and social status.