Category: Rowing

The head racing season reaches a pinnacle at the end of this month, with The Melbourne Head on Saturday 23 November, and Head of the Yarra on Saturday 30 November.
The sprint season will then be upon us!
So it’s perhaps timely that members keep in mind the way regatta crews are selected. Here is the policy:
RRC Crew Selection Policy
Primarily, selection is done by squad coaches. For practical reasons, the lines between squads and who is whose coach can sometimes be hard to define. So there is always a point where the club just has to work at the practical level and ad hoc.
That said, the club’s essential selection criteria are:

• Commitment to the training set by the coach and to the specified event (i.e. to being there, and to giving what the event will ask of the rower)
• Attendance at training and doing the ergos/land training required by the coach (even if self-reported)
• Eligibility for the event (e.g. ROMS score, weight, age)
• Fitness, skill and ability to compete in the event
• Crew ‘fit’ as assessed by the coach

and then the crew is still subject to:

• the availability of boats/oars/coxes/coach(es) for training and the event
• the event presets of the regatta

In the perfect world, coaches then communicate with the Head of Rowing to propose their crews and the Captain and HOR work on the last two points.
Occasionally rowers want to plan together to form crews. This needs to be done on a coordinated basis and with HOR approval, as it needs to take account of the club’s need to allocate resources for all rowers’ goals across the club.
If rowers have some goals around major regattas, they should approach their coach with a proposal that takes into account the selection criteria set out above.