Anyone watch the Slam Dunk contest this weekend?  I know, completely tangent to rowing, but hang with me here for a second.  Blake Griffin jumped over a KIA car in the Staple Center to become the 2011 Slam Dunk Champion.  Seriously, a car?  I started looking up similar competitions and found the 3-Point Shooting contest, the Home-Run Derby and the NFL Combine ... all the competitions that put the attention towards individual performance.  In the case with basketball, these competitions are pretty fun to watch and soon the playoff season and March Madness will be underway.  But what does this have to do with IU Rowing?

I don't need to reiterate that rowing is a team sport, that's clear.  But if you think about it, these individual competitions share some similarities with respect to winter training.  The winter training season is about developing and preparing rowers for the spring racing season.  Although the team is always the bigger picture in everyone's mind, these past few weeks have put emphasis more so on the individual.  I want to beat my 2k PR.  I need to get more reps in the circuit.  I need to be within this certain split range... things like that.  As each person gets faster, multiply that by eight or four and you got yourself a fast line-up.

So although pulling a 2k or doing a circuit may not be as thrilling as jumping over a car for a slam dunk, they kind of serve a similar purpose - it's simple, make the individual better so the team is better.  I think soccer star Mia Hamm says it nicely, "I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team, I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion."  The individual accomplishments are great, but put that together for the success of the team, now we're talkin'.

We were doing an erg workout on Thursday and many people were holding faster splits than they necessarily needed to be.  The team was really going after it despite being sore from circuits and stadiums the previous day and workouts leading up to it.  As tough as workouts like that may seem in the moment, it's a neat thing to think about afterwards when you know the team is just flat out hungry to race.  With the temperatures warming up, everyone is keeping their fingers crossed to be back on the water sometime this week.  Only three more weeks and we're off to Clemson.  I don't know if anyone will be dunking over any KIA's (well, who knows) but you can bet we'll be trying to jump over feats of our own. - Jackie Riedel, Junior, Exercise Science Major