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[ door creaking ]
-It's early morning at the
University of Washington.
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The sun has just cracked the horizon.
[ geese quack ]
The lake is calm and still.
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But the Conibear Shellhouse is buzzing.
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-Water is beautiful.
Coxswains we’re going to go to the Space Needle.
Go straight through the cut.
-And for the Husky women's crew,
it's time to get to work.
-I say just got a nice and slow.
♪♪
-The shells cut through the lake with ease.
But it takes hard work to make it look so effortless.
-Separate and float.
Yes. Nice.
-Guiding the team through today's workout is head coach
Yasmine Farooq, or “Yaz,” as she's called.
-The core is connecting your hand to the blade.
-She's laser focused, analyzing every stroke
as they progress through the practice.
-This is my eighth year at Washington.
I was at Stanford for ten years before that,
and I was on the U.S. team for eight years.
-She was also a two-time Olympian.
♪♪
-Rowing is a power endurance sport.
Keep your body level...
Body level.
So we have to train a lot of systems.
And that's why we literally train all year round.
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So there is certainly
the aerobic capacity -- is important
and you train that by doing a lot of what we call
steady state or low intensity miles.
[ machines whirring ]
Then there's also power, which
you need to get off the line and to be able to sprint.
[ shouting ]
So we do a lot of lifting.
We lift 2 to 3 times a week,
depending on the time of year.
-And then there are the intangibles.
It's the people.
And it is what they are willing to do for one another.
The character
that they have like that transcends everything else.
That's the most important.
-The unwavering determination of today's teams can be traced
back to the early pioneers of the sport.
♪♪
-The history of the University
of Washington women's program is exceptional.
It's always been defined by these women
that were breaking barriers.
You know, that were carving new paths.
And that's what they were doing.
They were coming down to row.
-The first documented report of women's
rowing at Washington was in 1903,
but it didn't really take off until Hiram Conibear
was hired as the coach in 1906.
-Hiram Conibear is the classic founder;
he’s our founder.
Even though we had started rowing before he arrived,
he is the founder of Washington Rowing.
-Conibear was a huge advocate for women's rowing
and wanted women to train just as vigorously as the men
and to compete.
College administrators, however, disagreed.
They thought a beauty contest with matching outfits
and graceful sculling was more ladylike.
-And Hiram Conover each time pushed back at
the University of Washington.
He would not be stopped.
He just would not be stopped.
-Conditions for the women were dreadful.
Their boat shed was cold, leaky and had no bathroom.
They had to trudge through muddy trails at 6 a.m.
to get to the men's boathouse to borrow their boats,
and they were forbidden to race,
but secretly...
-They'd go around the corner and go full power,
for sure.
-Over the next decade, three influential women coaches
continued Conibear’s work,
growing the program into the most popular
athletic activity for women on campus.
Then in 1917, the program abruptly ended.
-It was Hiram Conibear dying.
So right there they lost their number one advocate.
It was World War I starting, so suddenly campus
was radically changed. The boathouse was closed.
-And women's
rowing disappeared for five decades.
It wasn't until 1968 that rowing returned to campus
as a club sport, and again they put up with inadequate
funding, hand-me-down
equipment and harassment from the male rowers.
-The seventies were marked by this transition
that was created by Title IX.
And so they went from
being a club sport to a varsity sport.
-Conditions improved, but not without strong advocates
like athletic administrator Kit Green. Under her guidance,
women's sports flourished and the rowing program took off.
-Because in 1980, Bob Ernst gets hired as the head coach.
And the women became incredibly competitive.
And they won the National Championship 1981
and of course, then won
a national championship in ‘82 and then ’83 and in ‘84
and in ‘85.
So five national championships in a row.
It's never been done since.
-Another gifted coach followed Ernst. Jan Harville, former
Washington rower and women's assistant coach,
took over as head coach in 1987.
She led the Huskies to 11 PAC-10 championships,
three NCAA championships, and was coach of the year
nine times before retiring in 2003.
For the next 13 years, the Husky
women continued to perform at the highest level,
adding more accolades to the team's storied history.
-All of those chapters of this history
are why we have what we have today.
We wouldn't be who we are if it wasn't for those women,
and everybody on this team knows that
and they appreciate it.
-When Yaz came on board in 2016,
she inherited a team that was highly motivated.
So motivated that in 2017 they became the first school
in NCAA history to sweep all three final races
and claim the NCAA title.
Then in 2019,
the team was poised to sweep
their way to the NCAA title again,
and nothing
sums up the tenacity and grit of the Husky women,
present and past, like the epic varsity
eight comeback race from last to first.
-Washington now is in sixth.
-We're coming in the last 500.
And guess what? We got speed.
-Here comes Washington now moving through Cal.
Margins are getting tight!
[ shouting ]
-Last time!
[ shouting ]
We got it! [ Whoooo ]
-Final time of 6:07.2. [ cheering ]
University of Washington.
-And for everybody back home. [ group cheering ]
We are National Champions! [ group cheering ]
♪♪
Watch City Stream Tuesday night
at 7 on the Seattle Channel.
Or find us any time online at SeattleChannel.org
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