How Crew Started at Santa Clara in 1964 (Not 1965)

How Crew Started at Santa Clara in 1964 (Not 1965)

This story has been edited for readability.

Because Santa Clara started competitive rowing in 1965, a lot of people think that was the year that crew started at Santa Clara. That is not quite right.

Actually, the fall of 2024 marks 60 years since crew began at Santa Clara. My cousin, Mark Pisano MBA ’66, graduated from Georgetown University the previous Spring and had come to Santa Clara to enter the nighttime MBA program. When he was at Georgetown, he rowed crew and was a member of their four-man boat which competed in the 1964 Olympic trials. Mark came to Santa Clara not just for the MBA program but also to start a crew program.

One fall evening, after Mark finished his last MBA class for the night, he knocked on my dorm room door. Mark told me that not only did he want to start crew at Santa Clara but he also wanted me to help him. I knew nothing about it but had a vague idea that a crew would need things that Santa Clara did not have, like boats, oars, and water. Besides which, I was not and never had been an athlete. Mark thought those things were details that would work themselves out. He was right. Mark can be a pretty persuasive guy, so I agreed to help even though I was very apprehensive.

Mark’s plan was that, because Santa Clara had no water, boats, or oars, the potential crewmen would start by doing calisthenics to get them into the kind of physical shape needed for rowing. Mark would lead those calisthenics on the football field but, because he was working and going to school at night, the only time he had available was between 6 and 7 a.m.

My job was to find as many guys as possible who might be interested in participating in a crew program that had no boats, oars, or water. At first, most guys I talked to thought that the idea was crazy and wanted nothing to do with it. I convinced my friend, Bob Montgomery ’67, to get involved by telling him that the whole crew idea was, in fact, crazy and destined to fail miserably. I think the craziness of it all appealed to Bob and he agreed to help.

I hand-printed “CREW IS COMING TO SANTA CLARA” on 8.5” x 11” paper. Bob and I made copies of the sign and then posted one on every floor of every men’s dorm on campus.

We arranged for a meeting room at the student union and set a time and date for Mark to explain the crew program.

Much to Bob’s and my surprise, the meeting room was packed with 50 or more people.

Mark started the meeting by talking about ant farms. Ant farms are glass aquarium-like boxes that contain soil and a bunch of ants. The ants are always busy, building tunnels in this soil and hurrying their way through the tunnels. At first, the ants seemed to be living lives with purpose, but if contemplated it becomes obvious that the ants’ lives have no purpose and are absurd. Mark explained that most people live their lives as if they were living on an ant farm. Their lives are very busy and often appear to be filled with great seriousness and a sense of purpose but, like the lives of ants, can be pointless. If there is any human activity that seems pointless, it is rowing.

So why row?

Rowing is an amateur sport. The word “amateur” was derived from the Latin word “amare” which means “to love”. There are no individual recognitions or stars on a rowing team. There is nothing to gain by rowing other than the experience of rowing. Rowing is very hard and very demanding. Rowing requires great effort, sacrifice, and, quite often, the endurance of pain.

So why row?

For the love of rowing.

Rowing, like life, can be an absurd endeavor. The only way to learn to love rowing was to look beyond and then accept its absurdity. In the same way, the only way to learn to love life is to embrace its absurdity. Like life, the absurdity of rowing must be first accepted and learned before it can be loved. The joining together with others, in both the absurdity of rowing and the absurdity of life, brings meaning to both. Without that meaning, without loving others, the absurdity of both would be joyless and not endurable. (I was never a good athlete nor a good oarsman, but I came to love the people I rowed with and, thereby, came to love rowing.)

By the time Mark finished his talk about ant farms and rowing, there was absolute silence in the room. It was easy to sense that everyone was in deep and soul-searching thought. Then Mark changed the tone of his talk and told us what it would be like when we started our first crew practices.

We would be up by 5:30 a.m. to meet him on the football field at 6:00 a.m., ready to start calisthenics. This would happen 5 days a week and, as described by Mark, would be grueling.  In addition, everybody was to run two miles every day on their own time.

At the end of the calisthenics period of our training, there would be a physical fitness test to determine our places in the boat. The test would include a count for the number of pushups, chin-ups, burpees, a timed rope climb from a seated position using only our arms, and a timed run. In addition, as members of the crew, we were expected to not smoke and not drink during the season. The season would run from October to May.

At the end of Mark’s presentation, questions were asked:

1. Will we be part of the school’s athletic program?
   No. We will be a club.
   
   
2. Where will the boats and other equipment come from?
   We will borrow what we can from other schools and we will buy the rest.
   
   
3. Where will the money come from to buy what we need?
   We will raise it ourselves.
   
   
4. When can we expect to be rowing?
   Probably next year (1965.) We cannot say for sure because we don’t know when we will get boats and oars.
   
   
5. Where will we row?
   We don’t know yet.
   
   
6. You mean that we cannot have even one cocktail, once in a while, during the season?
   No.

What was there for a college kid not to like at this meeting? The realization that life could be absurd? Six a.m. practices 5 days a week? No smoking or drinking? Grueling calisthenics? Daily 2-mile runs? A long season? A rowing program with no boats or water and no guarantee that such things would ever appear?

On the first morning of that first crew practice, I went to Bob’s room to wake him up. Bob opened his eyes, looked at me, and said, “You told me that crew was destined to fail miserably. You lied to me! I’m not getting out of bed.”

By the time we got to our first 6 a.m. practice, a few days later, substantially fewer guys showed up at the football field. 

One thing we didn’t think about was that the school locked the field at night and we all had to climb a chain link fence to get through. Nobody had thought to officially inform the school that crew was coming to Santa Clara. Within a few days, we were able to obtain a “bootleg” copy of the key to the football field’s gate.

When the rainy season started, the football field was no longer feasible. We were able to get a key to the gym and our workouts moved inside. By the time we got to the last calisthenic session, there were only about 20 of us left. (Because it was the fall going into winter these calisthenics sessions started in the dark and ended just as dawn was starting to break.)

The Calisthenics Part of the crew program ended in early 1965 when we started to get boats oars and water to row on.

One point that I must emphasize is that, in its early years, crew was entirely a student-run club. We had no financial support from the university. Other than being all students of the university, we had no affiliation with Santa Clara. We were all kids. Mark, at 23 and in the MBA program, was the oldest.

1. We named our club “Santa Clara University Rowing Association” and incorporated ourselves under that name.
   
   
2. We raised money for and purchased our first eight-man racing shell. The cost was about $6,000 which, adjusted for inflation, would be about $60,000 today.
   
   
3. We received permission to row on one of the ponds that existed on the mud flats between Moffett Field and the south end of the San Francisco Bay.
   
   
4. We built our own boathouse on the mud flats. We built “The Boathouse” by sinking 4-inch by 4-inch posts into the mud and nailing corrugated metal siding onto those posts. That boathouse was only about two feet high and we gained access to the boats by removing the roof.
   
   
5. We built a floating dock. Before having that dock, we had to wade into the pond barefoot to put the boat into the water. This was a muddy mess. We built the dock using old telephone poles and 2” x 12” planking. Bob Montgomery came back to crew when we were building the dock. Bob was from Idaho and spent summers working in the outback wilderness. He had experience doing construction with heavy timber and was attracted back to crew when we were building the floating dock. After graduating from Santa Clara, Bob went on to row at the Vesper rowing club while attending the MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School in Philadelphia. Bob rowed as part of the US team in the World Rowing Championships in 1970.
   
   
6. Stanford let us use their training barge and training facilities at Redwood Shores.
   
   
7. Stanford gave us one of their old 8 man racing shells.
   
   
8. The Lake Merritt Rowing Club Gave us a set of used oars.

We had our first races in the Spring of 1965. Because we were all novice oarsmen, we were allowed to compete as freshmen. We went undefeated. I was a sophomore when crew started. In the subsequent 2 years of my time rowing, we would not even have a winning season but the sense of pride and wonder of that first season would never leave us.

Had it not been for my cousin Mark, I would have never come to rowing. For me to start rowing, it took both my inability to tell Mark no, and my unconscious and unwilling leap of faith, that rowing would become what it would become for me, without even having an inkling of what it was to become.

Dan Caputo ’67 is a guest contributor for the Santa Clara University Alumni Association.

Image Credits, Top to Bottom:
1965 Crew Team Photo, courtesy of Joey Karp, Associate Director of Media Relations, Bronco Athletics
1965 Crew Team Members at the 2015 Pasta Feed, courtesy of Jay Farwell, Director of Rowing, Bronco Athletics
1965 Crew Team Photo with athlete names, courtesy of Jay Farwell, Director of Rowing, Bronco Athletics