1889 Feb | March 2018

In 2006, Yaz was living in Eugene, Oregon, and leading a small rowing
club when she got a call from Stanford. With no high-level coaching
experience, the two-time Olympian wasn’t sure she was qualified for the
job. “You never know if being an athlete translates into being a good coach,”
she said. Even now, she struggles to name the few elite coaches who came
from coxing. Nonetheless, the sprite of a woman accepted the coaching
position and led the program to a second-place finish in her second year.
Stanford hadn’t been among the top three finishers in its history. In her
third year, however, Yaz and her team won the NCAA championship.
Gone was the doubt that a cox could steer one boat, but not a whole team.
Her coaching career was on fire.
Over the course of her ten-year tenure at Stanford, the coxswainturned-coach
would lead the Cardinal women’s rowing team to its best
run in its history. When she first took the Stanford coaching job in 2006,
her husband asked if there was any other coaching job that would entice
her to leave Stanford. Washington, she replied.
In 2016, UW called.
The resignation letter from the Stanford Athletics Department
showered her with praise. It would miss the coach who took the program
from obscurity to spotlight. Perhaps more troubling for Stanford was that
she’d be the coach of its Pac-12 arch rival. “She has invested a great deal
into the program and built Stanford into a perennial title contender,” the
athletic department wrote. “An Olympian and United States team captain
herself, Yaz knows what it takes to compete and lead on the sport’s
biggest stage.”
In her first year at University of Washington, Yaz would have the
daunting task of measuring up to the performance of long-time departing
coach, Bob Ernst. She changed how the team trained with more on-water
volume, she shuffled boat assignments and brought order to a fractious
team, which had dismissed its coach in a controversial mid-season ruckus.
“There are a lot of ways to go fast,” Yaz noted. “The training that I did
on the national-team level involved doing more aerobic base training and
volume. That’s what I implemented for them. They had a history of starting
fast, but fading before the finish line. The hardest thing in the beginning
was to get them to row with less intensity for longer periods of time—to
build what I call ‘the capillary superhighway.’”
She became the first coach to win the NCAA championship at two
schools. That performance was remarkable enough to make her the 2017
Collegiate Rowing Coaches National Coach of the Year.
A
YOUNG TEAM, ALL ROWERS FROM THE 2017
championship team have returned for another crack.
Into the water they went, the shells cutting sharply
through the 45-degree morning air, three boats of eight
slicing through Montlake Cut. They slid past the old
boathouse where the 1936 team trained and George
Pocock made his shells. In the fog around them, the ghosts of history
mingled with the prospect of making history again at the NCAA rowing
championships in Sarasota, Florida.
Elise Beuke pulled steadily along, her blades slicing into the darkness of
Lake Union.
Beuke, a 20-year-old sophomore, learned how to row in Sequim Bay
on the northern coast of the Olympic Peninsula. Her dad, a middle
school history teacher and cyclist, decided his kids would get involved in
ROWING TERMS
SHELL: a racing hull with
alternating single oar mountings
SCULL: a racing hull with double
oars for each rower
EIGHTS: an eight-oar boat with
one cox
VARSITY EIGHT: the top eight
boat for any team
SECOND-VARSITY EIGHT: the
second-fastest eight on a team
FOUR: a four-person boat
DOUBLE: a two-person boat
POSITIONS IN AN EIGHT: The
seats are numbered from the
bow, or front, to the stroke or last
rower before the cox in the stern
COX: the person without an oar
who steers the boat with a rudder
and deploys race strategy
STROKE: the rower closest to the
cox (the 8 seat) and responsible
for setting stroke rate and rhythm,
the first member of the stern pair.
STROKE LIEUTENANT: the seat
behind the Stroke (7), the second
member of the stern pair, who
interprets the Stroke’s rate for
rowers on the right side of the
boat
ENGINE ROOM: generally seats
3-6 that provide the bulk of the
strength
BOW: the last seat (1) on the
eight
THE RACE COURSE
The standard championship
race is 2,000 meters. The
course must be wide enough to
accommodate six lanes, or 298
feet, 7 inches.
Boats are aligned at the start
by focusing a vertical wire on a
vertical stripe on the far side of
the start.
Floating markers come in the
first 100 meters, denoting the end
of the start zone and at every 250-
meter interval to the finish.
Judges and cameras at the finish
line determine results.
FEBRUARY | MARCH 2018 1889 WASHINGTON’S MAGAZINE 57