Thanks to Delta’s epic meltdown, Bryan Blair had a circuitous route home from Phoenix over the weekend.
It wasn’t all bad for the University of Toledo athletic director, though. The travel snafu allowed him to watch The Boys in the Boat, the acclaimed movie about the University of Washington rowing team and its quest to compete in the 1936 Olympics.
The Hollywood depiction took on added context for Blair after UT added women’s rowing as the school’s 17th varsity sport. And he’s hoping the Rockets get a similar feel-good ending.
“Teamwork is one of the easiest things to say,” Blair said Wednesday during a press conference at Glass City Metropark, where the women’s rowing team will be headquartered. “We all talk about teamwork every day. It’s the most important thing in life, but it’s the hardest thing to actually execute because it requires sacrifice on everybody’s behalf.
“It requires a lot of shared vision. It requires everybody to pull in the same direction and do something bigger and better than we each could have done. This is what you see when you see teamwork.”
Sitting a few feet to Blair’s left were Metroparks Toledo executive director Dave Zenk, Toledo Rowing Foundation chairman Mike Dibling, Mid-American Conference commissioner Jon Steinbrecher, and UT interim president Matt Schroeder. Together, they turned an idea into reality, combining resources and putting the university and city first.
The women’s rowing program will begin competition in the fall of 2025. It’s the first new sport at Toledo since the addition of women’s soccer in 1995. UT will be the 92nd Division I women’s rowing program and they will have a roster size of approximately 60 athletes. A head coach is expected to be named this fall.
“I could not imagine a better opportunity with Dave’s creative thinking, and Bryan Blair and his team’s creative thinking, for two organizations to come together and to really plant the flag in downtown Toledo,” Schroeder said. “It’s easy to talk about collaboration and partnerships, but at the end of the day, it takes a lot of work to collaborate and to partner and to physically have the results of the efforts that the two of you have put in.”
The team will practice and compete on the Maumee River, with the Philip LeBoutillier, Jr. Memorial Boathouse in International Park — owned and operated by Metroparks Toledo and the Toledo Rowing Foundation — serving as their base of operations.
The boathouse is part of the $200 million Glass City Metropark and Riverwalk project, creating and revitalizing 300 acres of riverfront greenspace connected by five miles of multi-use trails spanning both sides of the Maumee River from Veteran’s Glass City Skyway to the Anthony Wayne Bridge.
“From the beginning, what we really envisioned for Glass City Metropark and Glass City Riverwalk was a place, frankly, where the community would simply be able to come together,” Zenk said. “We wanted many players, organizations, institutions, and partners to be able to help activate the core of our downtown in ways our community has never seen before. And we wanted the riverwalk to be a dynamic destination that fundamentally had the ability to reposition our region's identity.
“We wanted to use it as a tool to help attract and retain talent here in northwest Ohio. And amongst the reasons that we are so excited about this partnership with the university is that this checks every single one of those boxes. So we are thrilled and excited and thankful.”
The Toledo Rowing Foundation was formed in 1984. It’s been instrumental in the growth of high school rowing in northwest Ohio. The foundation began management of the boathouse in 2021.
“We’re thrilled to celebrate the launch of the University of Toledo women’s rowing program,” Dibling said. “This initiative represents a tremendous opportunity for high school student-athletes in northwest Ohio, as well for student-athletes across the U.S. and Canada. We also express our gratitude to the Mid-America Conference for embracing the sport of rowing and supporting it. It is truly the ultimate team sport.”
Women’s rowing has experienced a surge in participation and availability over the past quarter century, in part because the roster size helps offset the scholarship numbers for football. In 2021-22, there were nearly 7,000 NCAA women’s rowing athletes. Toledo will add to those figures, and it won’t be the last school to add rowing.
The MAC is adding women’s rowing to its portfolio, with UT, Eastern Michigan, and UMass forming the league, along with affiliate members Delaware, High Point, and Temple.
“You look for opportunities,” Steinbrecher said. “And then as we were getting serious about UMass, shortly right after, you start to look around and you go, ‘Man, we’ve got potentially a critical mass here,’ and then there was another conference [AAC] that dropped it as a championship sport, so it put some schools there. It came together quickly.
“I will say it seems very appropriate that a league that has a pirate should finally have a sport on the water.”
First Published July 24, 2024, 9:04 p.m.
