 | |
| Vol. 24, No. 18 | March 29, 1999 |
| |
| Vol. 24, No. 18 | March 29, 1999 |
BY A. DUNLAP-SMITH
Head Lightweight Crew Coach Tom Terhaar should be very proud of himself. In only his second year at Columbia his 1998 varsity boat ended its regular season 7-1 and was ranked second in the country. That earned the team a trip to rowing's mecca: the Henley Royal Regatta in England, where it advanced to the quarterfinals of the Temple Challenge Cup. Indeed, Terhaar reflects on the past with some pride. But when asked about how last year's victorious campaign was engineered-asked to sketch, really, a portrait of himself as a winning coach at Columbia-Terhaar says "Dan."
Dan?
"He was the biggest key to changing the program," Terhaar says, "because he got it rolling here with his first crew."
So Terhaar sketches a portrait of Dan Lewis: very hard working, patient, confident and possessing an absolute grasp of the challenges particular to a Columbia student-athlete.
A Medal at 'Sprints'
Until the freshmen lightweight crew grabbed the bronze at the Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges (EARC) Sprint Championships in May of 1995, the Light Blues had not stood on the medal podium at this three-day, season-ending regatta for so long it defied memory. The coach of that '95 crew was Dan Lewis, both a former Light Blue and a freshman of sorts himself.
A year earlier Lewis stood on Low Plaza with a diploma and 15 empty months before his deferment at Yale Law expired. The Columbia lightweight team, for which he'd spent three years as a coxswain, needed a frosh crew coach. Lewis applied and eventually got the job.
"I had no clue [to coaching crew]," Lewis says, grinning as he reminisces; "I just knew Columbia should do better, and I thought I could make them win."
At the time Lewis had about as much experience with winning as with coaching. Brought up in Phoenix where he played baseball until "they wouldn't let me play anymore" because by middle school he wasn't good enough, Lewis did not join a rowing team until sophomore year in college. A woman in his transfer group (he came to Columbia from Haverford in Pennsylvania) convinced him that being short and thin he'd make a perfect cox. [The coxswain sits in the stern of a boat facing the rowers and acts as the on board coach and cheering section.] The crew bug bit him and by his junior year he was in the varsity boat. But his zeal couldn't make up for slow crews. The combined record of his varsity boats was 3-13.
But his intimacy with losing was a powerful motivator for Lewis, who describes himself as a "very competitive person when in a competitive situation."
"I don't ever want [my crews] to lose; it's not a fun experience," he says, eyes fixed behind his wire-rim glasses. "Whatever I have to do to get them to win, I'll do-I work for them."
What he did was come up with little games and gimmicks to make the grinding months of work (the racing season is in the spring but training is year-round) palatable and to keep his team focused on winning.
"We stayed fired up and competitive all that year thanks to his tricks," says Darius Loghmanee, CC'98, of his freshmen coach.
Loghmanee, who rowed in the five seat ("I was the kid with the mohawk"), remembers Lewis's certificates for successful completion of winter training, the erg shirt for the best athlete on the rowing machine, the prizes for the winner of each erg test, the weekly quotes from The Bible about overcoming adversity, the cards with exhortatory phrases stuck to each oar and the challenges during practice to race all comers, including the varsity heavyweights and the motor launch.
Lewis continued to stoke his crew's competitive fire well after the season and the now-legendary bronze-medal race at the Sprints were over. Lewis went on to law school and to assist Yale's lightweights that fall, but "he'd send us e-mails from New Haven telling us to keep working hard; that we were as good as anybody," Loghmanee says.
Now a chemistry teacher at Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan, Loghmanee admits to employing Lewis-like gimmicks to push his pupils to surpass themselves, a testament to the depth of the impression Lewis left on him and his teammates.
From Bronze to Silver to . . .
Lewis returned to coach the Light Blue freshmen again during his final year of law school in 1997-'98. If he had doubters, who ascribed the success of his coaching debut to beginners' luck, he silenced them with his second season. Last year's freshmen went 7-1, losing only to Yale. At the Sprints they avenged the loss and took the silver medal behind Princeton, a team not on their regular schedule.
All praise Lewis immediately deflects elsewhere: to his athletes, to Tom Terhaar, to Andy Card whom he assisted at Yale, to Athletic Director John Reeves' improvements to Columbia sports, to his wife's expertise and counsel (she coxed from the eigth grade until her Barnard graduation in '95), even to the zeitgeist-"We're living in a more athletically oriented time."
Lewis is doubtless a modest man. Nevertheless, a suspicion arises that there's some trickery in these deflections too; that he's masking his real intentions to gain some advantage, some way to win.