Word: conibear
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bolles uses a variation of the Conibear-Washington style of rowing. It depends on a low stroke rate with a maximum of power. In fact, Bill Curwen, Harvard's stroke, maintains the lowest rate in the east today, varying it very little from 31 except at the racing start of the race and the sprint at the finish...
...actual rowing style of Harvard crews goes, there is little these days to distinguish it from most competitors. This is because most eastern colleges now employ coaches trained at the University of Washington, if not actual alumni, who have at least profited mightily from the so-called Conibear-Washington technique...
Bolles brought the Washington system to the Charles, one he learned from Callow, who in turn coached under the crew-great Hiram Conibear. Reluctantly, Bolles has tried to summarize the system for the layman. "Our stroke is a short body swing," he says; but he adds that the shortness is only relative to length used by oarsmen such as those at Syracuse...
...nearly 40 years ago, shaggy-haired Hiram Conibear, ex-trainer of the Chicago White Sox, stood on the shore of Lake Washington and cussed through a megaphone, so loud that his University of Washington oarsmen could hear. When parents objected, Conibear confessed: "I have to cuss a little in order to bluff my way along." Washington's new crew coach didn't know the first thing about rowing...
...Conibear read up on physics and experimented at night in his living room with a broom for an oar. He decided that the traditional Oxford style, in which oarsmen put their maximum power at the end of a long layback stroke, was not only unsound but uncomfortable. He taught a short stroke with a "sock" as the blade entered the water; the men were sitting upright at the end of the stroke, and ready for a quick recovery. In 1917, Hiram Conibear was killed (when he fell out of a cherry tree) but Washington crews went east year after year...