I’m brand spanking new at coxing. I’m an indoor rower instructor, where correcting form and giving cues is based on having a good view of body position. As a cox, I don’t have the body cues of my crew to help me (beyond my stern seat.) I know paddle height and timing should be telling me what I need, but I’m having a hard time interpreting what I’m seeing into form correction. Any thoughts you could share are appreciated!

Kayakers use paddles, rowers use oars. “Stern seat” is called “stroke”.

As a coxswain, in general you should be less concerned with correcting the bodies and more focused on the things you can see like bladework, timing, puddles, etc. Anything specific regarding the bodies will most likely be individual in nature and come straight from the coach since they have an easier time seeing those kinds of things. You should pay attention to what they’re saying to the rowers or crew as a whole so you can make “reminder” calls as necessary but the majority of your “body calls” are going to come from things you’ve heard the coach say, observations you’ve made on land, etc. and less so from direct observations while you’re coxing.

Just to clarify, I consider “body calls” to be about 99% related to posture and nothing else. Things such as handle heights, for example, are straight technique calls for me because I don’t need to see the body to know what the hands are doing since I can see the oars right in front of me. If something relating to posture is resulting in poor handle heights then I’d normally rely on the coach to make that call before I start postulating from several seats away what the exact issue is.

Now that I’ve been coxing for awhile I can typically make those calls on my own and be right or at least in the ballpark the majority of the time but when I was a novice I’d wait for my coach to make the call and then eventually incorporate the things he said into my own calls during practice, pieces, races, etc. once I had a solid understanding of the issue. Usually he’d go over with me after practice what he saw, why he said what he said, why this is the correction he had them make, etc. and then give me a day or so to process everything before asking me (spur of the moment) to explain it all back to him.

Most of the time it’d be on the water and he’d say “Kayleigh, if you were me, what would you say to Abby in order to correct the problem she’s having with missing water at the catch?” or something along those lines. When I could explain it back to him on the spot, in detail, and in front of my teammates proficiently enough, that is when he’d allow me to start making calls and corrections relating to that issue on my own. This demonstrated to him (and to an extent, my teammates) that I wasn’t just wildly guessing at what might be causing the problem, rather I was making a fairly certain educated guess on what was happening based on what I knew about the stroke, what I knew the rower’s tendencies were, and what the typical corrections were for that or similar issues. When making any kind of calls for the body, having the memory of an elephant helps a ton.

Poor timing is less about body position and more about just being too slow or too fast on the recovery. It can be because of other things but those are the more common reasons. Oar height is related to handle heights. If the blade is up in the air (known as “skying”) then the hands are too close to the legs on the recovery and/or feet at the catch. If the blade is barely off or dragging on the water then the rower most likely didn’t tap his hands down at the finish, meaning the hands are too high. The collection point for the finish is around the belly button/bottom rib so pulling in to this point should give you a solid couple of inches to tap the blade out. When they come away on the recovery the blade should be about six inches off the water to allow for a direct catch with little to no missed water. (If you have more specific questions – i.e. you’re seeing this, what does it mean, how should it be corrected, etc. – feel free to email me.)

Have your coach take a camera out on the water with him and try to get some video of the crew rowing if you want to learn more about what the rowers bodies look like and the corrections they need to make. Also ask if you can ride in the launch one day if you’ve got another coxswain who can switch in for you. I would say though that if you’re just coxing recreationally or as part of a learn-to-row program and not as part of a competitive team, don’t over-think things and try to find a solution to every problem right off the bat or think that every technique error is strictly related to something going wrong with the bodies. (I wouldn’t recommend doing that even if you are coxing competitively…) Just go out, have fun, and steer the boat. Let your coach do the coaching and just listen to what he/she is saying until you become proficient enough to make the calls yourself.

I went out a couple times with some of the adult classes when I coached at CRI and there were few things more irritating than trying to coach a boat with this one rower who knew pretty much nothing about rowing but thought they knew everything because they’d just recently been certified as an indoor instructor. Whenever they’d get in the coxswain’s seat they’d try to make all these grand observations and corrections but all it did was confuse the other rowers, waste time, and piss the coaches off. Input and communication between the coach and coxswain is great and pretty crucial but when you’re just starting out, the best thing you can do is just listen and develop a better understanding for the stroke before trying to make corrections on your own. One of my coaches used to say “you coach the blades and I’ll coach the bodies” and that worked well for us because I coached what I could easily see and he did the same without either of us interfering with the other. We’d both listen to what the other was saying and factor that into the calls we were making but for the most part, I was responsible for coaching/correcting the bladework and he focused on coaching and correcting the body positions.

Tags: coxswain novice qotd rowing technique