THE SPORT OF ROWING experiment, arriving at my own conclusions in Yankee style.”1589 Conibear also learned from his athletes. For instance, when 6’2½” 189cm 194lb. 88kg1590 Max Walske ‘16, “the finest physical specimen Connie had ever seen,” arrived as a freshman, he insisted on swinging to the entry position with only his inside knee between his elbows [now nearly universal in modern sweep rowing]. Rowing books of the time called this a fault, but “it had worked so well, had proved so natural, the method became a part of Connie’s ‘comfortable’ system.”1591 Mendenhall: “Thus, in the early years the Washington stroke was constantly evolving. Since Conibear came to the sport so late and so suddenly, he recognized ‘the endless opportunity for experiment’ and acknowledged that ‘no one is ever in a position to say that he has the last word.’”1592 Stan Pocock, who literally grew up in and around the Conibear Shellhouse, recalls one of Conibear’s greatest rowers: “When Rusty Callow was asked just what the Conibear stroke was, he said that he had no idea. As far as he could recall, Connie was demanding something different each of the three years he rowed for him.”1593 Mendenhall has also written of Conibear: “His enthusiasm often pushed him too precipitously from one extreme to another. For instance, his look at the Eastern crews in 1913 led him to experiment with an excessive body swing forward for the entry.1594 The 1914 crew did less well in Poughkeepsie [a distant fifth out of five crews],1595 and the next year Washington lost to a good Stanford crew. “In 1916, with [Freshman Coach] Ed Leader arguing for a less exaggerated, more comfortable swing forward, Washington beat California [in their dual meet] by sixteen lengths”1596 and Stanford by seven lengths to win the Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Rowing Championship and complete an undefeated season.1597 However, the inconsistency in the results of this period might well have been influenced more by the varying quality of oarsmen than merely by variations in the technique Conibear was teaching. This surmise is supported by the fact that in the very month that the Huskies did so poorly at the 1914 IRA, supposedly due to extreme body angle forward, Conibear published an article in The Outing Magazine1598 in which he described his rowing technique in detail. On the subject of body swing forward, Conibear recommended a moderate +25°, in sharp contrast to Cornell’s +30° and Syracuse’s +45°. To my knowledge, no films of the 1914 IRA have survived to confirm this surmise, but as we have already found in turn with English Orthodoxy and with Fairbairnism, no technique can remain rigid and healthy for long, so it would be no crime if Conibear was constantly learning and adjusting throughout his career. 1594 Syracuse won over Cornell and Washington in 1913. See the Syracuse technique under Jim Ten Eyck with +45˚ body angle forward, Chapter 1589 Conibear, p. 315 1590 www.huskycrew.com 1591 Ulbrickson, p. 95 1592 Mendenhall, op.cit., p. 8 1593 S. Pocock, personal correspondence, 2005 41. 1595 prompting the school to rule out future trips to the IRA for at least three years. 1596 Mendenhall, op.cit., p. 9 1597 They did not compete in the IRA. 1598 See Chapter 46. 426
