#Boys in the boat cliff note version series#

The faster and harder the rowing, the more difficult it is to maintain the swing. When each rower is in sync, they fall into their swing : the blissful state when the whole team rows in unison and the boat coasts along smoothly and powerfully. If just one person gets off rhythm, itвЂ™ll throw off the whole boat. ItвЂ™s crucial for the rowers to act as a unit. The candidates for the freshmen team were competing for spots on a boat that would include eight rowers and one coxswain, the person who sits at the back of the boat and shouts orders to the person in the bow, the rower at the front who sets the pace. Perfect rowing technique comes down to getting the right swing, when the rowers are all in harmony with each other. You canвЂ™t master the art of rowing overnight, as University of Washington rowing candidates would soon find out. JoeвЂ™s hard work paid off in the end: he graduated high school with honors and enrolled at the University of Washington. He kept himself in school, played banjo in a local band and eventually fell in love with a young woman named Joyce. He poached fish to sell to local shops and look advantage of Prohibition laws by building a lucrative bootleg alcohol business. Young Joe was able to keep his spirits up, however. The 15-year-old Joe was left to fend for himself in the town of Sequim, Washington while the rest of his family moved on. Unfortunately for Joe, his father chose Thula. Harry kept moving the family from mining towns to logging towns looking for work, and when Thula got pregnant with their third child, she gave Harry an ultimatum: either Joe had to go, or she would. Thula, JoeвЂ™s stepmother, rejected him, seeing him as nothing more than a painful reminder of her husbandвЂ™s first marriage.

Harry and his new wife quickly had two more kids, Harry Jr. Harry returned in 1921, remarried and tried to resume his parental duties with Joe. After his mother died, his father left for Canada and young Joe bounced back and forth between living with his aunt and living with his brother.

When he was four years old, Joe's mother died of throat cancer, which, unfortunately, was but the first of many setbacks. JoeвЂ™s only brother, Fred, was 15 years older. His father Harry ran an automobile repair shop. Joe Rantz was born in 1914 in the logging town of Spokane, Washington. When he was 12, heвЂ™d rowed 15 miles from his familyвЂ™s summer home on Bainbridge Island all the way to Seattle. Morris, on the other hand, was one of the only candidates with prior rowing experience. Many of the candidates were city boys, but Rantz grew up in a rural area and had built up his strength working with heavy equipment. Two of these candidates were Joe Rantz and Roger Morris, who both studied engineering. Their muscles, bones and lungs were pushed to their limits вЂ“ all under the unpredictable conditions of the Seattle weather.Д«y 30 October, the number of candidates had dropped from 175 to 80. The candidates spent the next few weeks discovering the physical demands of competitive rowing. He was pursuing his masters degree, and he wore a beat-up Stetson hat for good luck. The freshmen coach, Tom Bolles, was dubbed вЂњthe professorвЂќ by the sports media. The head coach was Al Ulbrickson, a no-nonsense man with two national championships to his name.

#Boys in the boat cliff note version series#

On Monday, 9 October 1933, 175 young men showed up to try out for the freshmen team and go through the series of grueling tests designed by the coaches. But the University of Washington offered part-time campus jobs to anyone who made the rowing team, so would-be rowers were even more motivated to try out. People could barely afford to spend money on food, let alone their educations. Back then, ten million people вЂ“ a quarter of the population вЂ“ were unemployed and roughly two million were homeless. In 1933, the United States was right in the middle of the Great Depression.