Start of Craftsbury Camps and Summer 2024 Plans

Updates and coming up this season

The new season of sculling camps begins this week at Craftsbury. We’ll have 33 camps over the next 20 weeks hosting about 1000 rowers of all ages, types, and levels to spend a weekend or week improving their single sculling ability. I start this week with the first three camps, and then I’m staffing four in June and three in September.

I’m also doing a weekly workshop again this year as part of the camp curriculum. In 2022, I taught the hip hinge, YWT-raise, and seated rockback. In 2023, I did basic strength training for any rower with the fundamentals of what we do with the GRP teams. This year, I’m instructing my favorite five movements that support the sculling camp technical curriculum. I’ll write more about this later on. For now, you have to be there! Let me know if we’ll see you this summer.

Our GRP rowers have been training and racing hard in a crucial Olympic selection year. Most have been away since January training on-water, doing selection camps, erg testing, and racing at Winter Speed Order in February and Olympic Trials in April. These rowers won at Trials and have just left for the Final Olympic Qualification Regatta (FOQR) next weekend: Emily Delleman and Grace Joyce in the quad, Cooper Tuckerman in the lightweight double, and Jacob Plihal in the single. If they win there, they go to Paris. The rest of the team is training for World Cup, Henley, and other summer racing opportunities.

We’ll have U23 rowers joining us next month, training for “Mega Worlds” in August, so named for hosting the U19, U23, and Senior World Championships events all in the same week. We also have our GRP Snow (ski and biathlon) teams beginning their off-season building phase with strength training, cross-training, and roller-skiing.

I did a lot of writing and videos over the last few months. Stay tuned for a few more new things coming up that I got done before hitting this seasonal transition point to my busiest coaching phase of the year. Catch up in the archives if you missed anything. One big project was the “Five-Year Update” to my book, a 40-page document of what’s different in my 2024 coaching versus 2019, with updated training plans and templates. This is included in the purchase of print/ebooks since February, and also available for $5 on its own.

I always like to plug my athlete transitioning or “retirement” resources around this time of year. Competitive sport doesn’t have to end with graduation from academic programs, of course, but it does for many rowers. This often gets lost in the end-of-season or post-season excitement and busyness, especially for a spring season sport. I find it valuable to make time to talk about what’s next with athletes and make sure they have resources for a potentially challenging time. I wrote a short blog last year with some actionable takeaways, and have a longer article on my website with research and more detail for those who want to go deeper. Thanks to everyone who takes a minute to share or start the conversation!

2023 campers achieve near-perfect alignment for video recording