The major tale of this weekend’s men’s IRA nationwide rowing championships (June 3-5 at Mercer Lake in West Windsor, N.J.) is that it pits No. 1-rated Cal, which has dominated races in the West this year, towards No. 2 Yale, which has been the king pen of the East and the country for the previous several decades.
Nevertheless, the much more fascinating tale is the romance of the Cal and Yale head coaches and their ties to Cal.
The Bulldogs are coached by Steve Gladstone, the 81-12 months-old coaching expert who was employed at Cal 50 several years ago, coached the Golden Bears for 20 years and led the Golden Bears to six countrywide titles. He also was Cal’s athletic director for 3 decades.
The Golden Bears are coached by a person 40 many years Gladstone’s junior, Scott Frandsen, who was the star rower on a few of the Golden Bears’ nationwide championship varsity eights beneath Gladstone (2000, 2001, 2002).
They remain near irrespective of becoming on reverse sides of the nation, but they will be intense competitors if Sunday’s varsity 8 grand finals arrive down to a tight dash to the end concerning Cal and Yale, as numerous hope. They are obviously the two best varsity eights in the state, with Cal wanting to get its initially countrywide championship considering the fact that 2016, and Yale seeking to get its fourth title in row (2017, 2018, 2019 there was no IRA nationals in 2020, and the Ivy League did not allow intercollegiate sports activities in 2021).
“He experienced a huge effect on my everyday living,” Frandsen mentioned of Gladstone. “A important determine in formative a long time for me. It’s morphed into additional of a mentor position. Even although we are competitors, this year and the very last couple of yrs, we still chat on the cellphone at minimum after a thirty day period and go in excess of issues we are experiencing or just life in standard.”
The mutual respect is noticeable.
“I have a incredibly, quite powerful attachment to Scott,” mentioned Gladstone.
The regard and attachment commenced when Frandsen arrived at Cal as an athlete who seemed to be too compact to operate effectively on significant-amount heavyweight crews.
“Right from the get-go he was driven, like a good deal of guys who are not as massive and impressive,” explained Gladstone. “And he experienced a burn on.
“He is intelligent, organized and a fierce competitor, and I enjoy it. I love the fact that I was ready to guidebook him to the extent he necessary steerage. What could be extra flattering than a person of your terrific athletes deciding they want to mentor.”
Coaching was not right away in Frandsen’s strategies. He graduated from Cal’s Haas Faculty of Company and attended Oxford for graduate do the job. He won a silver medal in rowing at the 2008 Olympics, and eventually embarked on a vocation in the rewarding subject of expense banking.
Then the chance to be an assistant mentor Cal arrived in 2012.
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“It was an attention-grabbing conclusion,” Frandsen claimed. “To challenge myself with the enterprise degree I bought from Berkeley and the prospective for a very good sum of income, maybe, or having involved in the software and styaing concerned in the activity that has been so influential and has modified my daily life.”
He selected the considerably less beneficial path — coaching — and was named the Bears’ head coach in 2018.
“Most days I’m incredibly, incredibly grateful to be in the role I am in,” he mentioned. “Supplying that formative encounter that I experienced. There is a large amount of price there, a good deal of meaning and a ot of lives impacted, ideally.”
Gladstone impacted a whole lot of lives whilst at Cal, but the biggest influence he experienced at Cal was as athletic director, when he hired Jeff Tedford as Cal’s football coach. Tedford experienced not been a head coach at any degree in advance of Gladstone pegged him to guide a Cal application that had a winning document the past 8 seasons and only a few profitable seasons the former 19 a long time. Cal had winning seasons in the 1st 8 a long time below Tedford,.
Gladstone dismissed narratives of eternal failure, this sort of as the a single that prompt Cal could in no way have outstanding football.
“All people narratives end up just as narratives,” he stated in latter phases of the video clip below. “The idea that anything can’t be completed is fallacious.”
The problem is which mentor will be featuring a congratulatory handshake to the profitable mentor on Sunday — the 41-12 months-aged Cal and Oxford alumnus in his fourth yr as a college or university head mentor or the 81-calendar year-aged previous Cal head coach who is trying to get his 15th nationwide championship?
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Include picture of Scott Frandsen by Michael Modlin
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