Clips from practice on the Potomac, Head of Occoquan, and Head of the Charles

I like what he says at 2:22 – “Our bow deck is on 71’s stern deck, let’s go. 70’s gone, time to make the next move. You don’t pass one boat then stop, you keep pressing…”. That’s a great call to make after you pass a crew, particularly if you’re close to the next crew in front of you. Another call that I really like (from Pete Cipollone’s recording) that would work well in this context too is “do not sit, do not quit”.

2:48, “bowball on the Charles, nothin’ better, let’s go baby, enjoy it…” This is a motivational call. This will get your crew fired up and ready to shift into that next gear. Not every motivational call is “yea guys you can do it woooo”, sometimes it’s as simple as pointing out that you’re passing crews at Head of the Charles because that is cool and that should motivate you.

The reason I wanted to share this recording isn’t necessarily because of the coxing though, it’s because of how the video itself is structured. If you’re reaching out to college coaches you should be including your audio in your intro email and this is a good way to format it. I’d include some short clips from practice of you calling part of your warmup, a drill, some steady state, etc., as well as a clip from a race, whether it’s a full spring race or a clip from a head race. Ultimately though it doesn’t need to be more than 10-12 minutes total of audio.

PNRA 2013 Head of the Charles Senior Women’s Masters 8+

This is a pretty good example of how to cox masters crews. If I didn’t know this was a senior masters women’s 8+ I probably would have assumed it was a youth or club eight.

I like this “power train” thing they do at 3:45 where the coxswain calls a ten for each pair. How she draws out her numbers and says “thaaaat’s four … thaaaat’s five …”, etc. is kind of annoying and not really the best use of her tone (I feel like it translates to sloppy/soft catches) but I’ve found masters crews tend to be less inclined to care about stuff like that. Ten strokes for each pair seems too long though so I’d probably cut it back to 3-5 per pair max.

At 10:27 when she’s telling Style Driven to yield it sounds like they’re not yielding so her telling her bowman to tell them to move is a good call on her part. Make sure you talk to your bow beforehand so they know you might ask them to do that and let them know that all they have to do is yell over at them “[Team name], yield!!”. Saying “yield or you’ll get a penalty” like this coxswain did can also be pretty effective since it’s like a 30 or 60 second penalty for not yielding to the faster crew. That’s a lot of words to get out though in the middle of the race and a lot of coxswains don’t do it effectively (they kind of just shout into the wind and fumble over their words) so it is something you should practice so you can establish beforehand what you want to say if the situation warrants it.

At 11:39 when she tells them she’s going to make a tight turn she does the smart thing by telling her starboards to be prepared to lift their handles up to counterbalance the boat (since it will naturally tip the side she’s steering to, which is port). I definitely recommend doing this so that the boat stays stable throughout the turns.

You can find and listen to more recordings by checking out the “Coxswain Recordings” page.

Tags: calls coxswain head of the charles head race high school masters racing recordings