Temple rowers prepare for Dad Vail in style | Mike Jensen
The refurbished boathouse is open after a homeless decade for the Owls.
B oats kept coming and going, right off the water, shells loading on a trailer bound for Florida, others carried into the boathouse bay, put up on racks. A normal scene this week on the Schuylkill. Except that boathouse bay belonged to Temple. Owls rowers carried those boats.
For the first Dad Vail Regatta in a decade, Temple rowing has a home.
"Electricity . . . WiFi," said Temple men's coach Brian Perkins, walking into his office inside the East Park Canoe House, pointing out the coffee maker already brewing a postworkout cup. "A roof."
"Lockers, not just sitting on stones between races," said women's coach Rebecca Smith Grzybowski, remembering how, the other day, "I swiped into the boathouse with my ID card, and I was like, 'This is never going to get old.' "
Temple women's rowing will miss Dad Vail for its conference championships this weekend in Sarasota, Fla. It's an automatic qualifier for NCAAs, so there is no choice. It's a tough break of the calendar, though. When Dad Vail gets going Friday, Temple's men will carry the Owls flag, carrying their boats out of that sparkling new boat bay onto a new dock.
"I really like the boat bay, the ceilings with the vaulted wood," said Temple senior Jack Higgins. "It reminds me of a little bit like a cathedral."
Soon it might all seem standard. Not yet. Not nearly yet, not when you were so recently homeless. That's the word they used about their little tent village just down the Schuylkill, now returned to nature. This is the last group for which all four classes experienced rowing without a boathouse since the tents were still home for Temple fall season.
Let's pause for a moment of silence for the old home.
OK, that's enough.
"We brought in the right guys," Perkins said of what it was like recruiting all those years out of a tent. "The kids who stood on gravel and looked around and said, 'You know, this is home.' They were just weird enough and mean enough to be Temple guys. So it worked out well for us."
Health and safety concerns
Don't think that Perkins, here the whole time as top assistant to Owls coach Gavin White, is getting nostalgic. Temple's men used to dominate Dad Vail. It hardly seems a coincidence that they couldn't continue dominating out of the tents.
"We were in the tents for 91/2 years," Perkins said. "The last fall, fall of '16, we got broken into more in the fall of '16 than the previous five years combined as we got closer and closer to completion."
As if it was one final test of will, like rowing the last meters of a race when you've built up lactic acid and lost the ability to clear it.
"Guys would climb the fence, take our gas cans that we fill our motorboats with, fill up their motorcycles, and then drive away in the night," Perkins said.
"You don't want to draw attention to the fact that all of your equipment is over a chain link fence that I can see over, to keep the honest thieves out," Grzybowski said. "We definitely lost equipment. Even sneakers, or backpacks. The team would leave all their valuables in their lockers at school. They couldn't even have their cellphones because we had a period when we were missing cellphones. Or you'd come back and your shoes would be thrown into the water because some kids decided that's a fun thing to do on an afternoon."
That wasn't even the biggest problem. Perkins immediately brought up health and safety of the rowers, how they couldn't properly stretch after a workout in the cold. "Guys would go backward in terms of flexibility, then you'd see more injuries." And the hygiene: "Washing your hands. We switch oars left and right. There's only three points of contact: hands, butts, and feet. If you get an infected blister, you couldn't run for a couple of days. You couldn't wash your hands. Just basic, basic things that you take for granted, we didn't have."
In a sport in which the rowers are always looking back, all that is gone but still in view. Now Perkins can film a workout and right away plug it into a widescreen TV that sits above the ergometers, the rowing machines used for land workouts. Open a door, and you have a spectacular river view. The oars stack up vertically at the entrance to the boat bay, the shells lining up to that vaulted ceiling.
As he gave a quick tour, Higgins, a hockey player from Abington who switched to rowing as a Temple freshman, used phrases such as "huge blessing" and "huge privilege" in talking about the new digs.
His old morning routine: "You come down. You get your boat out. You get on the water. You get out. You try to get in your car as fast as possible."
New routine: "We have room to stretch, room to warm up, room to meet."
'Boys into men'
This class of Temple seniors has experienced so much, including their freshman winter hearing how their sport was going to be dropped amid other Temple sports cuts, igniting a local firestorm that resulted in a reversal and a big gift to restore the condemned boathouse. These seniors make it clear how they appreciate what was done for them even as they reminisce about life in the tents.
"The cold mornings, like no lights on. You had to go back behind the tent and plug in, like, this shady cord," said senior Rob Byrne. "It came from the St. Joe's boathouse. We would borrow power from there."
The next generations of Temple rowers get to find their strength in other ways as the tent years pass into Owls lore.
"It made you tough. It wasn't physically healthy, but it definitely turned boys into men," Byrne said after his first varsity eight had come off the Schuylkill. He was inside, about to grab dry clothes out of his locker. "This is definitely way better."
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