With a few rallied dormmates, a donated leaky shell, a handwritten Constitution, a nearly-scorched barn, immense luck and even more hard work, Bob Ford built the Massachusetts men’s club rowing team from the ground up.
The 2024-2025 season marked 60 years since the program was reinstituted at UMass, and the team has come a long way since then, growing from eight members to a current roster size of 38 and capturing notable victories at high-profile regattas such as the New England Regional Championships.
Dating back to the school’s days as Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1871, the rowing team of that era shortened its name to become the “Aggies.” A few years later, after some financial issues, the Aggies disbanded and its old shells collected dust.
Ninety years later, the spirit of the crew team was revived at UMass – all at the behest of a student named Bob Ford.
With nothing but a dream and the youth valiance to make it happen, Ford walked into the office of UMass’ former dean, Warren McGuirk, as a freshman. He had just one mission: to start a rowing team. After rowing in high school, Ford thought it would be fun to continue the pursuit in college.
“Young man, I listened to another young man just like you years ago, and I got all this [fencing] equipment for him and nothing ever happened,” McGuirk said to Ford. “You want a crew team, you start it.”
The young Ford didn’t have a single cent to put towards building a team. But this was hardly the biggest obstacle ahead of him, and he was nothing if not determined.
“I had to find at least seven other people that were as nuts as I was,” Ford said. “Fortunately, at a school the size of UMass, you can find people interested in [just about] anything.”
The freshman rounded up a few of his dormmates, but none of them had ever rowed before. Since they weren’t sure if they would even like rowing, when Amherst College head coach Hank Dunbar generously offered Ford and his friends the opportunity to test out his shells and coaching boat, they accepted. After using the borrowed boats, they decided to continue developing the club.
From there, they needed their own shells. Ford drew up a constitution so they could receive funding for oars and wrote to every rowing program in the Northeast he could think of for extra equipment. Every response wished him well, but had nothing to give him and his crew.
All but Yale.
They had one extra shell with a hole in the bottom that they agreed to give him, free of charge with no delivery fee. With a station wagon his father Clayton had borrowed and a shell carrier from Amherst College, Ford picked up the boat from where Yale left it for him at Quinsigamond Pond, not daring to breach 45 mph as he cautiously towed it back.
Dean Blysdale of the agricultural school dealt Ford the next kind gesture. At the time, UMass owned some property along the Connecticut River in Sunderland. After Blysdale heard about the fledgling crew team, he offered to let the team use one of two tobacco barns there to store their shells, even personally plowing a path from the structure to the water.
That winter in 1964, the crew’s fragile beginnings almost went to ashes before they even hit the water when one of the two barns burned down. By some miracle, the barn storing the nascent crew team’s equipment – and the only shell the club had to its name – remained intact.
“[It] would’ve ended the crew team right there,” Ford said. “Mother Nature, the good lord was taking care of us. Somebody was.”
After training over the winter using rowing equipment they set up in the basement of the Old Chapel, Ford and his crew of eight were ready for the river. Heading out into the icy March water, they flipped the boat in their first run. Two members quit on the spot.
Trials did not end there. As the only one with rowing experience, Ford helped his novice crew navigate through two concrete bridges on the river. One wrong veer and the whole shell would be splintered.
“I just had a positive view of life,” Ford said. “I always figured stuff was going to work. And if it doesn’t, you keep plugging away.”
This sentiment has lived on throughout the entire team’s existence.
It took rebuild after rebuild and decades of progress to get the rowing team to its current state. The now-Minutemen didn’t win their first boat division at the New England Rowing Championships until 2001, 37 years after their rebirth.
In recent history, COVID-19 led to a decline on the roster to where there were only seven members on the team a year and a half ago. With continued recruitment efforts headlined by team captains Sam Sturdy and Mark Justin Legarda, the Minutemen grew exponentially from seven to 38 crew members in the 2024-25 season. The roster number was only a plus to the tight-knit community being built on the water.
“This is my family that I’ve built here,” Sturdy said. “It’s basically seven or eight years deep of the people a couple of years before me and forward … everyone’s built that family [over] eight years and it continues to expand.”
This is not the first time the club has gone through a dramatic recruitment rebuild. Ford’s roster numbers remained low during his first two years, and by the third fall, the need for recruitment was high.
“Nothing happens in crew by yourself,” Ford said. “You’ve got to have other people or you don’t get anything done.”
He hung posters around the Student Union and dining halls and got the Massachusetts Daily Collegian to print a recruitment advertisement. When Ford began to doubt his club’s future, his teammate Barry Beswick encouraged him to keep going, and it paid off. Ford was met with 80 new faces in the fall of his junior year, which propelled the club forward.
“Sometimes you think ‘Will this work?’ And at the end of the day, it succeeded far beyond my expectations,” Ford said. “I set it up thinking I wanted to row and figured I could recruit some other guys and maybe find some equipment to do it with. And by George, look what happened. That was a wonderful, wonderful surprise … that I hope [has left] a great legacy [at] UMass too.”
Helping with that legacy was David Clarke, who arrived at the 80-person meeting in 1965.
The UMass graduate student left an assistant coaching position at Amherst College to voluntarily be the Aggies’ head coach – free of compensation. He came to the team when they were fundless and desperate for a coach, as their first two did not have the time or experience to effectively guide the crew. Up until then, Ford shouldered almost all of the club’s responsibilities, all while competing as an athlete himself and trying to keep up with his government classes.
Clarke arrived at a time when UMass needed him the most to build its rowing program into a competitive force. He showed up every day on time and ready to work, utilizing his expertise to transform the club into a contender that could hang with other top teams in the region, such as Harvard, Yale and Amherst.
Nine years after its rebirth, the Aggie crew team won its first of consecutive Dad Vail Regattas: one of the most prestigious collegiate rowing competitions.
Since then, the program has not reached that same level of success. Back then, they were a prestigious eights program, competing with shells manned by an eight-person crew and a coxswain. In recent years, with dips in the roster numbers, they have been a program mainly consisting of small boats, with a range of one to five people manning most of their shells.
Ahead of the 2024-2025 season, the team welcomed a new head coach: Isabelle Bigelow. She was a former rower at Washington College, where she was introduced to the sport. Bigelow joined the team in the midst of another rebuilding era as she earned a master’s degree in Athletic Leadership from Springfield College.
Bigelow understands better than anyone the meaning of offering a thriving rowing team at UMass. The sport is unique because it requires no previous experience – it is welcoming to anyone, whether they are looking for athletic pursuit, structure or a community.
“It’s important to keep [rowing] open as an option to people,” Bigelow said. “Historically, accessibility to the sport is limited because of how expensive it is … It’s so great that people can find it so late in life … once you join it, clearly you’re hooked.”
UMass rowing doesn’t just train a team; it fosters deep bonds.
The team goes on a training trip for over a week every year given financial accessibility. The crew spends the whole time together, rowing upwards of 15,000 meters during the day and building connections on and off the water.
“If we build chemistry earlier in the season, by the time we get to championship season … we all have one mindset and come together as one unit,” Legarda said.
Legarda, Sturdy and Kayan Volpe all brought up the training trip as a highlight of their times with UMass rowing. Alums that Sturdy has spoken with from the 2010s recalled their own memories from the trip, making it a part of the team’s ongoing legacy.
The crew team continued a time-honored tradition on its most recent venture: milkshake outings after training. As the three vans pulled up to a Steak n’ Shake parking lot in Gainesville, Florida, music blasting and spirits high, they noticed a truck broken down in the drive-thru lane.
There was no hesitation: they quickly hopped out and asked the truck driver if he needed a hand, and he gratefully accepted.
The sentiment from the team was clear and shared according to Volpe: “‘Yeah, we’re rowers, we’ll do it for you.’”
Together, they pushed the vehicle out of the drive-thru. Once again, the crew fulfilled its identity and worked as a strong, efficient unit for the greater good of its program and those around it.
The principle traces back to Ford’s experience with the team 60 years ago.
“It was a beautiful training for life, I think, to be involved in this sport that … really teaches you a lot about sacrificing your personal achievement for the good of the team,” Ford said.
With these connections and camaraderie gained, the success of the crew team has extended far beyond its competitiveness and absolute focus on and off the water.
“Building that family, I have just found such a tight connection with this group,” Volpe said. “And that tight connection has allowed me to put 110 percent into my morning practices … I’m foot to the floor every morning because I know that these guys are [too] and I know that together, we’re just getting faster every morning that we’re out there.”
It is more than just a club – it is a legacy that began in 1871 and is rooted in Ford’s efforts. Every season, the network grows with new rowers who become a part of a unique community that reaches back to when the club was just one donated shell and a dream.
“Everybody has the same goal [and] not just towards competition,” Sturdy said. “We do a lot in mind for the alumni. Do it for the alumni. Do it for the future of the team … It’s always trying to build on the culture, build on the legacy of the team since 1871.”
While the Minutemen row toward new milestones and accomplishments ahead, they never forget to keep their eyes on the water and rich history behind them.
“I look back on my one-shell day – one shell, one set of oars, one constitution and eight guys,” Ford said. “… To see the growth and the development and the number of people that have shared my love of this sport over the years has just been … huge.”
Caroline Burge can be reached at [email protected] and followed on X @Caroline_Burge.
