How to be more personal when coxing a race…?
There are tons of ways but here are my top three.
The best/easiest/most obvious way is to say your rowers names instead of their seat numbers. Calling a rower by their seat number is one of the laziest things a coxswain can do in my opinion (like, I truly can’t emphasize just how lazy I think it is) and it really grinds my gears when I hear them doing that. There’s just no excuse for it.
Related: Listen to Kaitlin’s recordings (here) as well as Connor’s (George Washington University – there are six, all found here) for examples of this. You always hear them address the rowers by name, not number.
Something I do a lot is call moves for pairs, which I talked a bit about in the post linked down below. I do it most often in the latter half of the race, usually between 1250m and 1750m since that chunk between your mid-race move and right before the sprint is when the boat can/will start to sag. Calling a pair out, especially when the race is close and saying “Quinn and Mik, you wanna be first across the line? Let’s get our bow ball in front over the next five...” or “sitting even, [ 5 + 6 ] go take your seats … on this one” are other examples of how I like to do it.
I read an interview awhile ago where Pete Cipollone said that one of his calls during the ’97 Worlds race (I think it was that one) was “on this one, the Americans have no fucking speed”. That was a direct quote from the coach of one of the countries they were racing against and it had gotten the boat really fired up so he turned it into a call that preempted one of their moves. That kind of “bulletin board material” – even though it’s not individually-personal, it’s still boat-personal – is a great thing to bring in the boat with you, provided you save it for the opportune moment for maximum effectiveness.
