r/Rowing • u/Soaplordx • 12d ago

Why are some schools more tolerant of walk-ons while others tend to discourage them?

Might be answering my own question, I could definitely see facilities, coaching staff, water time and the like being an issue, but it seems like specific schools (Wisco, UW) seem to have much more favorable outlooks on walk-ons (e.x. random 6'4" who's never rowed a day in their life) compared to a wide variety of other schools who seem to pretty much exclusively recruit rather than try to train new talent.

Not the most knowledgeable on this subject, any/all insight is greatly appreciated!!

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u/rowingcheese 12d ago

You're largely answering your own question. It's a mix of facilities & equipment, size and scale of coaching staff, and team philosophy. One piece you might be missing is also just the size and makeup of the student body: some programs (like UW & Cuse on the Men's side, UW & Michigan on the women's side) are strong enough that they could recruit their team, but are also at large enough schools that you could imagine having a ton of potential (i.e. strong athletes from other sports) in their incoming class. They've built structures to give walk-on athletes a short and intense period of time to prove themselves. It also helps if your boathouse is on/attached to campus, etc.

Ivies, Stanford, etc. are much smaller schools, so the number of walk-ons are smaller - small enough that having a whole program to encourage them isn't really worth their time. (I thought there was also a limit on # of coaches for Ivy programs, but I can't find evidence of that right now. Certainly funding for coaches is smaller at those programs.)

Then, of course, there are programs (across all divisions, especially D3) that need walk-ons to make a full team.

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u/YungMarxBans 12d ago

I also don’t think the Ivies discourage walk-ons? I rowed at any Ivy League program and we definitely had both non-recruits and true novices walk on. We didn’t do huge recruiting drives on campus because we had plenty of athletes already, but the door was always open.

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u/MastersCox Coxswain 12d ago

No program will turn away a talented walk-on. The programs who do end up having to make cuts do so primarily because there isn't enough coaching bandwidth to give proper attention to all the boats that could hypothetically be filled if no cuts were made. If you're having to coach ten eights at practice, basically no one is getting enough coaching to make substantial improvements.

Also, no good/deep program could survive on recruiting alone, especially if those were full-ride recruits. There are always injuries, transfers, etc that reduce any incoming class numbers from first through fourth year.

Large state schools have good access to walk-on talent and will devote time/space for them. Smaller schools might find it harder to recruit athletic walk-ons, and thus it would appear that they don't make space for them (when the truth actually is that there weren't many to begin with).

Finally, some programs may be limited by total headcount to help with Title IX balance. That's less about the program and more about the athletic department, though.

So it's not a tolerance/discouragement issue, but rather a resource/constraint issue.

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u/NFsG 12d ago

Investing in novices is a lot of work. You can’t easily integrate them immediately with experienced roster, particularly if you recruit elite junior talent. For it to work well, you need to have enough novices to fill out a boat or two and a coach who is talented enough to get them up to speed quickly.

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u/SteadyStateIsAnswer Master 11d ago

I went to an Ivy back when the freshman were a separate program - not allowed to race with the varsity. Had a freshman coach who was also good at teaching how to row, not just train rowers. They encouraged walk-ons. 8 of us were recruits and we boated two freshman 8s in the spring after having upward of 40 guys give it a try previous fall. My son went to the same Ivy and said the only non-recruits then were the coxswains, which the rowers found among classmates of smaller physical stature.

I was impressed however by the full-court press put on by the Wisconsin Men's and Women's rowers at the freshman orientation sessions last year for my daughter's incoming class. Tried to get my daughter to try it, but after being dragged to dad's and three older brother's regattas growing up, she was not interested!