Sport: Compton Cup and Connibear

What Notre Dame is to intercollegiate football, the University of Washington (Seattle) is to intercollegiate rowing. Not only do practically all the racing shells used by U. S. college crews come from the tiny workshop of famed George Pocock on the Washington campus, but of the 19 U. S. colleges which maintain crews, 18 have Washington-trained oarsmen on their coaching staffs, eight have Washington-trained head coaches. Last week, the newest Washington-trained head coach made his debut as such in the first important event of the eastern rowing season. He was Tom Bolles of Harvard, appointed last autumn to replace Charles Whiteside whose crews, though they beat Yale four times out of seven in four-mile races at New London, did poorly in shorter races. The event was the one and three quarter mile varsity race in the Compton Cup Regatta, on Princeton’s Lake Carnegie.

Put up in 1933 by Dr. Karl T. Compton, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and onetime Princeton physics professor, the Compton Cup for the first four years was won regularly by Princeton. Last week this embarrassing situation ended when Harvard’s varsity boat, smoothly stroked by Jim Chace, slipped across the finish line a length ahead of Princeton and five ahead of M. I. T.

Of the three other races on the program, Princeton’s only winners were its freshmen. Harvard’s junior varsity (its only other entry) won by a length. Little M. I. T., which lacks the facilities of its two rivals, beat Princeton’s 150-lb. boat by three feet. Crew critics agreed that Coach Bolles, whom Harvard hired after his Washington freshmen beat five other freshmen crews at the Poughkeepsie Regatta last June, had brought Washington efficiency to Harvard’s boat in record time, anticipated an even livelier rivalry than usual this June at New London when Coach Bolles’s boat meets Yale’s—coached by Washington-trained Ed Leader.

The crew saga of University of Washington, in which Harvard began a new chapter last week, started when famed Gilmour (“Gloomy Gil”) Dobie went to Washington as football coach in 1908. As trainer and rubber Coach Dobie had a onetime bicycle-racer and Chicago White Sox baseball trainer named Hiram B. Connibear. Washington had just decided to have an eight-oared crew, handed the job of coaching it to Trainer Connibear, who had not only never seen a college crew before but never even rowed a boat. It was Coach Connibear who made Washington the producer of almost all U. S. eight-oared shells, made himself the “father of Washington rowing” and a grandfather of U. S. crew racing.

Coach Connibear never did sit in a rowing shell or pull an oar. Instead he set out to learn and teach rowing through contemplation, which he attended to at night while sitting on a nail keg in the boathouse.

Across a continent from most high-grade U. S. college crews, Coach Connibear began by studying physics, reading books on rowing. Having mastered rowing theory, he devised his own means of putting it into practice. He raised the rigging in the boat to give more clearance above his oarsmen’s thighs, thus permitting more leg power. He cut short the “lay-back,” theretofore considered the most essential part of the stroke. Unfamiliar with nautical terms, Connibear coached his crews in baseball slang. Before his first big race, the Washington faculty tried to have him ousted. After it, when Washington had beaten California, he was a Washington hero.

In England, toward the end of the Century, a boatbuilder named Pocock, among whose products was a craft which Explorer Sir Henry Stanley used for navigating rivers in Africa, took to building racing shells. His son Frederick Pocock built shells for Eton, Oxford, Cambridge. Another son, William, became the world’s sculling champion, crew coach at Westminster School. Frederick Pocock’s son ‘George won the United Kingdom Handicap at 17, in a 26-lb. pine shell he had built himself. His daughter Lucy was women’s sculling champion of England in 1910-11. In 1911, George Pocock and his brother Richard emigrated to the U. S., set themselves up in the shell-game at Vancouver, B. C. near a good supply of cedar. In 1912, Coach Connibear discovered them, induced them, to move to the Washington campus. Coach Connibear died in 1917, when he fell from a plum tree, broke his neck. By that time Pocock shells and the Connibear system of rowing were becoming the U. S. standards.

Crew Coach Ed Leader, who succeeded Connibear at Washington, where he had played football as well as rowed, started the Washington monopoly of U. S. crew-coaching. His western successes attracted the attention of Yale, whither he went in 1922 taking Richard Pocock with him. He was succeeded at Washington by Russell (“Rusty”) Callow, who brought the West Coast its first Poughkeepsie Regatta winner in 1923, went to the University of Pennsylvania in 1927. Currently, Washington crews are coached by Al Ulbrickson, whose major rival is Ky Ebright, Washington coxswain in 1916-17, now head coach at California. Between them, Washington and California have won the Poughkeepsie Regatta, in which Yale, Harvard and Princeton are the only major crews that do not compete, eight times in the last 13 races. California crews won the Olympic championship in 1928 and 1932, a Washington crew in 1936. Other colleges with Washington-trained head coaches are: Cornell (Harrison Sanford).

Marietta (Ellis MacDonald), Rutgers (Chuck Logg). Logg was at Princeton for seven years until succeeded in 1932 by able Gordon Sikes, Princeton 1916.