Watch the people who quit

I was recently floored (literally) by a trapped nerve and so I found myself doing a lot of reading to escape the pain.

Just imagine how desperate I was for fresh material when I started looking at the British Rowing strategy that was recently published… however, I felt a strange mix of emotions when I read the following: “Review competition, ranking points and non-competitive event opportunities”.

For me, this is everything that has been neglected by the sport over recent decades, so it’s an exciting opportunity. But, you know, it’s the hope that gets you.

As a membership organisation British Rowing is a giant leaky bucket, a leaky bucket full of rowers who will join and leave over time.

If the objective is to grow the sport, then it is to have as many rowers in the bucket as possible.

There are two ways to do this:

1. Put more rowers into the bucket each year.
2. Stop rowers leaving the bucket each year.

Question: If you want to grow the sport, would you focus on 1 or 2?

Take a moment to think about it.

If you picked either of those options, you’re wrong. It’s a trick question, you need to do both.

The easy way out is to throw money at marketing to get more people to take up the sport. (I said easy, not cheap).

But if you want the more effective and longer term solution, it’s to get to the bottom of why people leave and to motivate them to stay - even if it’s just for a little bit longer.

In my eyes the competition framework is the most powerful lever that British Rowing have to influence the membership - and I don’t see that as being limited to athletes, it reaches coaches and club committees too.

If we start with rowers, rowers are grafters. We’re good at suffering - this is intrinsically linked to one of the core values that I believe rowing offers - a linear relationship between hard work and success.

When you first start, it’s both mentally and physically taxing: the boats are unstable and full of moving parts, there’s a new vocabulary to learn and rowing’s brag about using the most muscle groups is something you’ll feel every single day.

But the first time you cross the line at a regatta with your competition flailing behind you - you’re hooked. Ask any rower in that moment: was the hard work worth it?

Hell yes!

This is why the Novice status was such a brilliant piece of social engineering.

It’s onboarding done really, really well. A finite milestone that everyone understood, offered real value and it sucked people in. Everyone remembers winning their novice pot and I’m glad that novice status is set to return.

But it’s not enough.

Beyond novice there’s a vacuum, the current competition framework gives athletes no sense of progression and no ability to map out meaningful competitive goals.

I experienced this first hand at Tyne Amateur RC recently while I was encouraging them to set some process goals for the season. The sheer diversity in the ways that people expressed their goals showed:

1. How differently motivated people within the same squad can be
2. That the lack of a coherent competition framework means there’s no shared vocabulary that people can use.

British Rowing should own that vocabulary.

There should be a clear progression through the sport that is meaningful, it should represent achievement and in my humble opinion should be achieved by winning a race and crossing the line first. This is the value that motivates people - from novice to the Olympics.

If the sport doesn’t engineer some false summits there are no opportunities for people to stop, look around, and enjoy what they’ve achieved before tackling the next stretch.

Think about martial arts where participants work their way through coloured belts. Or music where students can work through grades.

With the next achievement in sight, it’s far less tempting to pack it in.

I really hope this kind of thought process is adopted to give people a reason to stick at the sport for a little bit longer.

But it’s not just about motivating athletes.

The day to day experience that people have within the sport is dictated by the environment that is created by the coaches, clubs and competition framework/events - but especially the coaches. They determine the volume and intensity of the training, set season milestones and drive the culture (among the hundreds of other things I know coaches do).

So how can British Rowing use the competition framework as a lever to improve retention by shaping the motivation of clubs and coaches?

I see two ways.

The first is everything above - a competition framework with a clear sense of progression would equip coaches with a path to follow for their athletes, ideally with events and season milestones that could be targeted as part of their season’s strategy.

The second is to recognise that it’s a deficiency of the sport that in most cases, competitions only really reward and recognise the achievements of crews - it’s a one-dimensional focus on quality.

If quality is the driver for clubs and coaches - would you expect high retention?

What if the competition framework could be re-shaped to reward the dimensions of both quality and quantity?

This already happens in very limited cases, several events offer a victor ludorum. A league of all the clubs entered in the regatta, scoring points based on their performances throughout the event.

At these regattas:

• Everyone’s performance matters.
• Clubs who do well, focus on both:
  • Quality
  • Quantity

But these rankings are rarely publicised. Live updates are limited to towpath whispers if you know the right people and the winners are typically announced just as everyone’s loading their trailers to head home.

Instead of only announcing the victor ludorum winners in a blog post three days after the event - get the whole leaderboard published so everyone can see where they rank. Better still, get the leaderboard published in real time so that everyone can follow along and track how they’re doing, get excited about being ahead of their rival club - give some real meaning to the last few races of the day as the league rankings start to solidify!

Adopting this is not to rip up what we have and start again, it’s an additional layer that can sit on top of what we already have.

Even without touching the ranking points this could be built and I think British Rowing should not only be championing this format, they should be providing the infrastructure for events to run their own - the required data already exists.

But more than just event based leagues, British Rowing should be running leagues in this way that span events and create season long narratives that reward quality and quantity, incentivising clubs to race more often - is that not the change we want to see?

There are already well defined regions, the more you race and do well in your region, the more points your club earns on the leaderboard in a bid to become the regional champion (or at least a place ahead of that club who you just have to beat)

A national league would just be the aggregation of the points that contribute to the regional ones.

Engineering local rivalries and creating a framework that rewards quality and quantity - and all using data that already exists.

Will British Rowing do any of this?

Who knows. It’s not easy, nobody is asking for any of it.

But any armchair behavioural scientist worth their salt will tell you not to listen to what people say, watch what they do.

And if you want to grow the base, don’t watch the people who stay in the sport and achieve all their goals and try to create more of them. Watch the people who quit, and look for ways to motivate them to stay - that’s where the real gains are.