Brian Davis

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — As Wittenberg University senior Brian Davis watched the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics on television, he had the same reaction as so many other viewers.

"I could do that," he thought.

Unlike most people, however, Davis is doing something about it. A member of the Wittenberg Crew Team, a club sport organization on Wittenberg's campus since 2001, Davis is putting in long hours of training, competing in national events and daring to dream of something great.

"You see the Olympics on TV, and you think that's just for the best people out there," said Davis, a psychology major. "It dawned on me that perhaps those people were just ordinary people who realized that the Olympics was what they wanted to do.

"From that point, they chased their dreams and pursued a goal that once didn't seem possible."

So as he prepares for one final collegiate rowing season and life beyond Springfield, Ohio, Davis has his mind on the world's biggest sports spectacle, held once every four years with representation from hundreds of nations. After graduation in May, Davis plans to move to an East coast city - possibly Philadelphia or Boston, where the sport of rowing is extremely popular - and join a crew club team created to develop skills of world-class rowers. Several U.S. national team members competing in rowing events at the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics got their starts in a similar fashion.

Davis came to Wittenberg considering an intercollegiate football career after enjoying some success on the gridiron at Wadsworth High School near Akron, Ohio. After deciding to hang up the football pads, he played for the Wittenberg men's rugby club team during the first semester of his freshman year before discovering the Wittenberg crew team - and the sport that would become his passion.

The Wittenberg crew team was started in 2001 by former students Kim Jackson and Jen Lykens and began competing in regattas during the 2001-02 school year. The women's team was organized first, and the men's team, including then-freshman Davis, started up in spring 2002.

"From the very first practice, I just kind of fell in love with it," Davis said. "It became obvious to me that this was something I wanted to do for a long time.

"I get antsy when I'm sitting in class, thinking about going to row, getting out onto the water. It's been a great opportunity for me personally, and it's been a lot of fun being a part of the team."

After a couple of years commuting to a training location on the Scioto River owned by the Greater Columbus Rowing Association (GCRA), the Wittenberg Crew Team found a home at Lake Lagonda in Buck Creek State Park. The club has six boats which can accommodate four or eight-person crews, and it has been given space to store the boats temporarily at Buck Creek.

"I'm proud of the way the team has taken off on campus," said the club's adviser Brian Beckley, Wittenberg Class of 1998 who is now assistant director of admission. "It's a sport where a lot of students who are no longer involved in varsity sports, but still desire a competitive atmosphere, can satisfy that hunger."

The Wittenberg crew team has about 30 members combined currently, and members are "as involved as they want to be," according to Beckley, with regularly scheduled practices at Buck Creek during the spring and fall and voluntary winter workout sessions in the HPER Center Fitness Center. The teams compete in about seven regattas per school year, and they have also ambitiously organized "Learn to Row" activities and fund-raisers that continue to heighten local awareness of the sport.

"This is such a new sport, not only to Wittenberg but to the Springfield area, that it's kind of exciting to introduce it to the community," Beckley said. "There has been a lot of positive response from local people, especially during early morning workouts at Buck Creek. They're interested in what we're doing, in part because they've never seen it before."

Davis has taken it to another level. He trains two hours per day, six days per week, year-round, utilizing rowing machines, treadmills, stationary bikes and weight machines. On the water, Davis rows for both the Wittenberg Crew Team and for a team representing GCRA, appropriate considering how much different members of the latter organization have helped Davis and the university's club team in general through the years.

Davis credits Suzanne Arnold and Steve Lopez of GCRA with turning that initial exposure to the sport in 2002 into the passion that it is today. The first full-time coaches of the Wittenberg Crew Team, Arnold and Lopez provided encouragement and worked with Davis individually to prepare him for the intense physical demands of the sport.

Scott Dybiec, current GCRA head coach, and Ryan Briggs, former president of GCRA who has been involved with the Wittenberg crew team in recent years, have also taken an interest in Davis, who helped GCRA to fifth place out of 100 teams at the Outdoor Nationals in Oak Ridge, Tenn., last year. Dybiec is helping Davis "fine-tune" his rowing skills and preparing applications for the East coast crew clubs.

Briggs also helped Davis take things a step further this winter. He accompanied Davis to three indoor rowing competitions in which rowing machines are connected to one main computer to measure times in a 2,000-meter race, the standard length of a traditional outdoor race.

Wittenberg Crew team members prepare for a practice.

At St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati on Jan. 30, Davis finished 12th out of 30 rowers in the men's open division in a competition for Ohio rowers only. Then on Feb. 13, Davis was one of 248 competitors at one of the biggest and most prestigious annual indoor rowing events in the world, the CRASH-B Sprints World Indoor Rowing Championships in Boston, Mass. CRASH-B stands for Charles River All-Star Has-Beens, an organization of former U.S. Olympic and World Team athletes who "maintain an untraditional irreverence to all things that are not fun," according to its Web site.

The 2005 event drew competitors from around the world, including current and former world indoor and outdoor rowing champions, Olympians and Pavel Shurmei of Belarus, the world record-holder. Davis posted his best time ever, finishing in 6:26.90 to take 101st place.

"One of the biggest reasons I competed in the CRASH-B wasn't because I thought I would win it, I just wanted to get used to this sort of competition," Davis said. "I need to get used to competing against high-caliber competition. I want to be able to say that I've done things like this and competed against the best."

Davis is in the stretch run of his collegiate career now, and he is ready for one final collegiate season after the team took part in a spring break training trip to Camp Cooper in Summerton, S.C. This well-known training facility is utilized by many prominent collegiate rowing teams, including ones representing varsity programs at Johns Hopkins University, Pennsylvania State University and the University of North Carolina.

Rowing at Wittenberg may be something of a novelty, but Beckley is proud of the club team's accomplishments in a relatively short time. Davis, with his work ethic and lofty aspirations in the sport, reflects those accomplishments.

"We've been extremely resourceful in being able to accomplish what we have in a short amount of time," Beckley said. "A lot of our success is because of a great collaborative effort by administrators, GCRA, officials at Buck Creek and motivated students like Brian Davis."