Course Correction by Ginny Gilder Page A

boathouse limited the crews in that direction, but four miles of wide, meandering river stretched upstream for their uninterrupted use. Recreational boat traffic was scant and no other rowing programs used the waters, which kept them calm and peaceful. The gentle hills that rose and fell along the river’s shores provided a visual respite from the rigors of practices.
    Derby’s scenery and the facilities were oceans away from the urban jungle surrounding the lagoon. When the women’s program earned varsity status, the women finally gained access to Derby and the men had to make room.
    To the women, Derby was heaven, but the heavyweight men protested that we made their lives hell. With limited equipment of our own, we begged boats from the men’s program, diminishing the guys’ inventory and storage space. We occasionally damaged boats—hitting the dock on landing, running over submerged debris during practice—just like the guys; fixing our mistakes ate into Jerry Romano’s availability to repair and rig their boats. We shared dock space, imposing on their launch and return times. We rode on the bus with them to and from practice every afternoon, enduring their sly comments and obvious glares.
    But we couldn’t share lockers, toilets, and showers. The boathouse had one tiny bathroom on the first floor that the women could use to relieve themselves before and after practice, but there was no place to shower or change. All that had to wait, and often that wait approached two hours.
    Rowing is not a dry sport. Besides the obvious source of moisture, sweat produced by aggressive exertion, the backsplash of oars entering the catch guarantees that everyone who doesn’t sit in the stroke seat gets drenched at some point or another. Add to that the late winter, early spring air temperature in Derby, which averages in the mid-thirtiesin February and creeps up to the mid-forties in March—don’t even consider the possibility of precipitation—and you have prime breeding conditions for sickness.
    Fifteen to twenty minutes after the women got on the bus, sweaty, soaked, and, by now, often shivery, the men would straggle on, clean, hair freshly combed, wrapped in warm jackets, and eager to hit the dining hall for dinner. Reaching campus before the last dining hall stopped serving always proved a scramble, as the drive back took nearly half an hour, which meant that our showers had to wait even longer. No matter the weather, we waited for the men in wet clothes, we endured the bus ride back to campus in wet clothes, we ate our meals in wet clothes, and we walked back to our dorm rooms in wet clothes.
    â€œWhat about taking a shower in Joni Barnett’s office?” Anne joked to Chris one afternoon in late February. (Barnett was the director of women’s intercollegiate sports and reported to the athletic director.) “We could bring in a bucket, sponge, soap, and a towel.” Chris sneezed and wiped her nose. Only a week into rowing outside at Derby following the breakup of the winter’s ice that had sheathed the river, she’d already caught a cold and Anne was struggling with pneumonia. They weren’t alone; several more women rowers quickly came down with respiratory ailments after we began practice at Derby.
    The university had unwittingly laid the groundwork for rebellion. Realizing the boathouse needed an upgrade, no doubt helped to this conclusion by Chris’s steady complaining, the powers that be decided to transform the building’s unused third floor into space for the women and shared the blueprints with Chris. However, because the expansion would require modernizing the existing structure to meet new building codes, the university deemed the project too costly and nixed it. Instead, it resorted to the solution devised the previous season: importing a temporary trailer that squeezed a triad of showers and a parking strip’s worth of locker room