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In response to the rapidly changing intercollegiate athletics environment and the historical realignment of amateur collegiate athletics nationwide, I would like to emphasize three main areas where your help is needed.

The first, and most important, is endowing Washington Rowing; there can be no higher priority today than for all of us to ensure this unique program – so instrumental in the building of character and core values in young people for over one-hundred years here at Washington – is thriving and available for generations to come. I hope you will have a chance to read about the rapidly changing intercollegiate athletics environment I have written about below  – but first, here are links for gifts to our men’s and women’s endowments that I hope you will consider:

The Boys in the Boat Endowed Fund for Men
The Women's Title IX Legacy Endowment

Secondly: since inception, the history on these pages has been supplemented and deepened through the memories and photos saved (and found) over time by our alumni and families. Your donations of Washington Rowing memorabilia – and in particular original photographs or scrapbooks – can be highly valuable in helping me tell these stories, or provide insight previously unknown. If you have an in-kind donation for the history, please do not hesitate to contact me here.

If you would like to help with the costs of the development, design, hosting and curation of washingtonrowinghistory.org, please use the form linked below (via Zeffy, a non-profit site that supports independent writers). All of the content here has been – and continues to be – collected and published without institutional funding or assistance. It is in many ways a free, independently written and researched, constantly evolving book open to the public… one that I have had offers to publish in print, but most would require the site being taken down (so as not to compete with book sales). That would, of course, defeat the purpose and mission of the project, and I am committed to continuing to self-fund this site as I have since the beginning. But if it does inspire you, or you enjoy the personal stories here, please consider a gift to help offset some of the costs, or - even better - help us endow this program in perpetuity.

Thank you,
Eric Cohen, '82
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Endowing Washington Rowing

Since NIL reshaped college athletics in 2021, the financial foundation of intercollegiate sports has changed permanently. University resources and institutional strategy are increasingly centered on revenue sports, football compensation, and the new costs of staying competitive on the field.

Olympic sports like rowing — part of the modern Olympic program since the 1900 Summer Olympics — operate very differently. Rowing at Washington remains rooted in amateur ideals, long-term student and athlete development, and competitive excellence built on our unique culture and history. But in today’s environment, non-revenue sports cannot assume financial stability simply because of tradition or past success.

At the University of Washington, rowing has been one of the most successful and historically significant programs in collegiate athletics on both the men’s and women’s sides. That legacy was built over generations. Protecting it now requires forward-looking action, with an eye on the past to guide us forward.

It is critically important that all of us understand the permanent shift taking place in collegiate athletics funding. It is why the Washington Rowing Stewards – the alumni leadership group first established under Hiram Conibear to lead the community in protecting the program – are asking for your participation in endowing Washington Rowing in perpetuity.

The Boys in the Boat Endowed Fund for Men
The Women's Title IX Legacy Endowment

Understanding the New Financial Landscape

Since 2021, college athletics has undergone the most significant, abrupt structural change in over one hundred years. In fact, in rowing history terms, it would be back to the post WWI era (1918-1922), when west coast rowing was upended and faced elimination. (Stanford’s high-level program was cancelled at this time for loss of funding, and would only re-emerge decades later; women’s rowing was cancelled at Washington; Cal and Washington men’s teams survived on community support and cooperative effort).

Learn About the 1919 Season
Men's Coaches

Today, following the U.S. Supreme Court decision in NCAA v. Shawne Alston (2021), athletes were granted the ability to monetize their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL), a major shift away from amateur athletics. That transformation accelerated further with the House Antitrust Settlement (2025), which allowed schools to share revenue generated from sports with athletes, particularly in football and men’s basketball. All of this represents a seismic shift: for the first time, institutional athletic department revenue — in the tens of millions of dollars (per school) — is moving directly into college student-athlete compensation.

Throughout all of this there has been a major (100+ year) re-structuring of conferences. 2024 was the last year for the Pac-12 (the legendary “Conference of Champions”), with Washington moved to the Big 10, Cal and Stanford to the Atlantic Coast Conference, and WSU and Oregon State left to fend for themselves in a new, re-imagined pacific coast conference.

The result – and continued after-shocks – has created a high level of uncertainty for Olympic sports. For most of the last century, football revenue helped underwrite broad-based athletic departments, supporting Olympic and revenue sports alike. Now however, a large portion of that revenue is being redirected back to football, and particularly athlete compensation, in order for football to remain competitive.

This is not a temporary adjustment. It is a permanent re-definition of collegiate athletics and a major restructuring of how college athletics financially operates.

The good news at Washington is twofold: 1) the Big 10 provides a substantial revenue share for Washington and 2) the Washington Athletic Department, and the University itself, remains currently committed to our rowing teams and the tradition and legacy of the program.

However, in this environment, and given the extreme uncertainty looking into the future, endowment for both our men’s and women’s rowing teams has become essential. Endowment ensures that rowing – rooted in tradition, educational mission, and long-term student-athlete development – are made permanent in a collegiate athletics environment that has become increasingly unpredictable.

At Washington, our strength is in our tradition and our community. Our alumni, our supporters, the city of Seattle – they have always come through for us. And as in the past, this challenge will be met head on with the same energy and focus this sport teaches. Join us, as together we ensure Rowing at Washington remains the “classroom on the water”, that changes young lives and creates opportunity, for generations to come.

“…there are several [sports] like crew and track athletics, which run deep into the deficit, which must be made up by football receipts. And these expenditures are growing steadily. At the time of the war a great amount of sentiment was expressed in faculty and athletic column to the effect that this was the time to start a new era of economical administration in athletics.”
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
January 23, 1921, reflecting on the national (and particularly west coast) post-war climate of downsizing or cancelling university sports, specifically targeting non-revenue programs like rowing