What lies ahead: Planning for Michaelmas 2020
October is in sight and with it come new challenges for SEHBC. British Rowing has now moved into Phase F, allowing mixed households to row in eights. As well as BR, SEHBC must also abide by university guidelines and obtain college permissions when reopening our boathouse.
Throughout the last few months, the BR guidance has been very clear and useful when it came to planning. Since July, members have been allowed to use the single sculls or the double/pair with members of their own households. We are now hoping to open the upper boathouse for socially distanced erg sessions and before term starts, we hope to have college approvals of our covid-safe measures to allow for mixed household rowing. These measures will include keeping a log of everyone who’s attended a session, only having one crew present at the boathouse at any time, maintaining social distance where possible in the boathouse, the use of face masks while moving the equipment, the use of a face visor for the cox during the outing, and frequent cleaning of equipment.
The committee has also surveyed individual members of the squad to ask about personal preferences when it comes to training, and the majority have responded that they would be comfortable with covid-safe measures in place and are also very keen to row next term.
Michaelmas is the time to recruit new members and this will also prove to be more challenging with current circumstances. We are yet to hear about how swim tests will be run or whether the rowing tank at Iffley Sports Centre will be opened. Amongst all this uncertainty however, a network of presidents from college boat clubs has formed allowing for these questions to be discussed and safety plans shared.
More excitingly, the captains, India Brough and Ollie Shepherd, and I spent a couple of days in July conducting Zoom interviews with coaching candidates. We are delighted that Tom Hole will be returning as Women’s Head Coach, and I will wait for the captains to finalise contracts with the other coaches before making any more official announcements. Ollie and India have also decided to integrate novice training more so than before by having two coaches oversee our whole novice programme rather have two separate ones #oneclubonedream.
We are still unsure of exactly what next term will bring but we will endeavour to run a fun and safe term of training for SEHBC.
Jess Radley (President 2020/21)