THE SPORT OF ROWING Easy to Teach An overlapping-sequential technique also gives the appearance of being easy to explain and easy to understand, which was very important in its evolutionary development. Allen began his career in the sport as a member of (and eventually became coach of) Vesper Boat Club on Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row, and since they gathered the best athletes available from programs around the country, their challenge each year was to quickly form a composite crew from these disparate sources. Dietrich Rose: “Rosenberg and I were involved with trying to teach people who had rowed the different styles from all these colleges, crazy styles. Schoch coached different. Burk coached different. You name it. Everybody. Jablonic at Wisconsin. They were all different, and they all insisted they were right.”5086 Rosenberg: “A diversity of technique would come into the club, and the challenge of hammering them into shape was immense, so we had to come up with a technique which could be taught and learned easily and effectively. “We had about six or seven weeks at the most. Guys would come in after the IRA, and we had to get to speed very, very quickly before the Canadian Henley and U.S. Championships, which were in August in those days. “There had to be homogeneity, and that was the biggest problem we faced, and then to do it very, very quickly because the season was very short.”5087 The Rosenberg approach also had the enormous advantage of making intuitive sense. It seems reasonable and sensible, and 5086 Rose, personal conversation, 2010 5087 Rosenberg, USRA Clinic, Chula Vista, CA, Sept 11-2, 2004 it sounds reasonable and sensible, which helps when a coach must convince skeptical athletes to adopt it. Rosenberg: “I had the same problem in 1963 and ‘64, the pre-Olympic and Olympic teams. I had two big guys from Yale, Budd and Clark, and when I told them what I wanted by way of technique, they wanted to know how I had come up with it. “After all, they had rowed for Jim Rathschmidt, who was truly a legend at Yale since he had taken the Yalies to the Olympic Gold Medal in 1956, so I was always being asked to justify what I was doing.”5088 Quickly establishing the credibility of his approach to technique was no less challenging for Allen ten years later when he took the reins of the 1974 National Selection Camp for the men’s heavyweight eight, inheriting five members of the previous year’s crew, including several members of rival coach Harry Parker’s Harvard program. Modern Orthodox Technique is straight- forward, direct and has become enormously influential throughout North America, Western Europe and the British Commonwealth. During the ‘60s, it was the perceived alternative to the Ratzeburg Style, and when that technique faltered, it then became the Western alternative to the approach of the rising German Democratic Republic.5089 But word descriptions of rowing technique are inherently tricky, and miscommunication had already played a role in the mutation and devolution of English Orthodoxy, Fairbairnism and George Pocock’s and Frank Muller’s approaches to boat moving. In the same way, however straightforward and simple it might appear, history has recorded that Modern Orthodox 5088 Rosenberg, op. cit. 5089 See Chapter 119. 1406