Ready 'oar' not, new club team takes to the water

"All eight! Squared and buried at the catch ... Sit ready ... And full! Half! Three quarters! Full!"

The coxswain's voice echoes over the 80 acres of the vacant Homer Lake in Homer, Ill., as the Illini crew team heads full-speed in a practice-race start.

Its 45-year-old fiberglass boat rumbles the steady waters for the last time this semester.

But it's only the team's first school year rowing - the Illini crew is new to the University.

"Either I was gonna start it or it wasn't gonna happen," Dan Walsh said, the founder of the team.

After rowing for two years in high school, Walsh, a sophomore in LAS, was disappointed that the University didn't have a team of its own.

"It is really fascinating how far we've gotten just from a dream of Dan's and a problem - that there wasn't any crew team - to actually having boats and a trailer and a lake for us to row," Isaac Bloom said.

All of the other members didn't have any prior rowing experience, but they were dedicated. They spent the winter waking up at 5 a.m. to train on the machines at CRCE and finally got to go out into the water this spring.

"It's pretty crazy that from going to CRCE, just practicing on the (equipment), to actually going out in the water, we were able to pull off a team," said Bloom, one of the coxswains and a sophomore in FAA.

Within its first year, Walch said the team has already had much success, finding dedicated members without any prior experience, and already succeeding in competitive tournaments.

At its first tournament, a men's team won a race and the eight-man team lost by only milliseconds against much more experienced teams.

"I couldn't have asked for a better year," Walsh said, who only expected the team to get a practice schedule underway.

At their last practice this Thursday night, the Illini invited new people to come out and row in hopes of recruiting them for next year's team.

Current members drove people who were interested to the lake and taught them about their team and the technicalities of rowing.

"It's awesome," said newbie Stacy Alikakos, junior in LAS, wading out of the water after her first time rowing. "I definitely didn't have the rhythm and its counter-intuitive with your arms (but) I'm coming back."

Walsh thought the recruits performed well in practice.

"There's a lot to learn; they learned a lot in the five or six strokes that they took," he said.

"Maybe we're the rowing equivalent of 'Cool Runnings' or something," Walsh added, "trying to start a team in the middle of central Illinois where you have to drive forever to find a lake in the middle of the corn fields, but it worked."