Club Profile/ Apr 6

Getting to Know the Orillia Rowing Club

To honour the history, dedication and current initiatives of each rowing community, Row Ontario will be producing a series of profiles on member clubs across Ontario. Today we get to know more about the Orillia Rowing Club!

Orillia Rowing Club
Established: 1998
Location: Orillia, Ont.
https://orilliarowingclub.com/Home.html

The Orillia Rowing Club was established in 1998, making it the first ever rowing club to operate in the area. However, the history of rowing in Orillia dates back over a century before that to the late-1800’s.

Jake Gaudaur was an Orillia native, and one of the first stars of the sport of rowing in Canada. His professional rowing career began in 1880 and he would go on to compete in elite rowing competitions all over the world. He would become a world champion sculler in 1896, a title he held until he was defeated in 1901. After returning home from his world championship win in 1896, Gaudaur was given a parade and a reception by the town and Orillia’s mayor awarded him a $500 prize. Gaudaur grew up rowing on Lake Couchiching and many of his family members rowed on the lake as well. While there wasn’t a formal club until 1998, the city of Orillia had solid rowing roots and a background in the sport. In the late 1990’s, the idea of starting a rowing club came to fruition thanks to several local rowing enthusiasts.

Tony Kaija, Diane Barr, Heather Driver-Kerslake, Kerrie Pellarin, and Marci Csumrik founded the Orillia Rowing Club in 1998. They were all local rowers who wanted to share their love of the sport with the local community. The club’s first two years in operation were at the Champlain Yacht Club in Orillia, which was located in Pumpkin Bay on Lake Couchiching. Just two years later, the club moved to a new location a few kilometres east on the lake, and into a city-owned building at Tudhope Park where it remains today.

In addition to the founding members, there have been a number of key contributors at the club over the years. With the move to the new location in 2000, the club needed to improve its infrastructure in order to provide the best experience for its members. Ron Pidgen contributed greatly in this regard, as he was instrumental in building the boat and oar racks in the boat house and along with Don Clune another early contributor, built the clubs first trailer. Pidgen also served as head coach of the club for a number of years. Laurie Herd was another key figure at the club during its first decade in operation. Herd started Orillia’s first student rowing program in 2005 and remained involved with the club in a number of different capacities. Other key contributors at the club during its early years include Barb Davidson, Don Salmon, Carol Strickland, Pamela Sunstrum, Rhonda Lauer, and Barb Pidgen, who is the current President. There have been many more contributors at the club over the years, including a dedicated group of volunteers who have helped the club tremendously over the last five years.

As the club grew and the membership and programs developed, they began to host several different events for both club members and the greater rowing community. Since they were founded, Orillia has been heavily involved in row touring and have hosted three regional tours with Ontario Adventure Rowing. All of the tours had the title of ‘Jake Gaudaur Tour’ as the participants rowed down the routes Gaudaur used for training on Lake Couchiching. The tours began at the south end of the lake where the club is located and went all the way up the lake to Washago for lunch and a break. The group then returned back in the afternoon in what was an approximately 32km round trip.

The club has also been involved in hosting indoor rowing events in the past and has designs on bringing bigger indoor events to Orillia in the future.

“For several years we hosted an indoor rowing event,” said Barb Pidgen, the Orillia Rowing Club’s current President. “We started it at a few different locations, but we’ve been partnering with a local crossfit gym to host it at their facility since 2008. We’ve had a number of rowers from this area attend as well as others from other areas like Toronto and CrossFit members from the gym as well. One of our goals for the future is to make the event a little bigger. The city of Orillia has built a new recreation centre with an indoor gym so we are planning on partnering with the city and hosting the new event there and we hope that it will become an annual event that the Ontario rowing community looks forward to attending. We’re hoping to debut it next winter in 2022.”

In addition to their touring and indoor rowing events, the Orillia Rowing Club also hosts a banquet each year for its club members as part of their Annual General Meeting in November. The banquet is always a time to look back at the previous year, celebrate the success of the season, and hand out awards to the members.

While the club has their sights set on creating new events, they have also been hard at work further developing their current programs and creating new programs for their members. As a community club, they try to offer something for every age group. The most popular program on a yearly basis is the learn-to-row program for adults. In recent years, the learn-to-row program has taken place over a weekend. After completing the learn-to-row program, the participants have the option of becoming a full member, or they can purchase either 5-row and 12-row cards that will allow them to continue developing their rowing skills without purchasing a full membership. Another signature program that the club runs is their row touring program. Any member of the club can sign up for their tours, which run once or twice a month, though space is limited.

“For our tours, we choose different routes on local waterways like Lake Simcoe, Lake Couchiching, the Black and Green River north of Washago, Gravenhurst, or Beausoleil Island on Georgian Bay,” said Pidgen. “We take our wide touring boats and explore the scenic waterways of lake country. It’s a unique program and I would say it’s pretty popular with our masters recreational rowers. Anyone who joins the club can attend the tours and the only costs are if we have to trailer the boats for gas money, there’s no additional fees outside the membership fee. It’s pretty unique, and just for our club members.”

With an eye towards increasing membership numbers and competitive opportunities for its members, Orillia has three exciting new programs that have debuted in the last two years. The first is a two-stream performance competitive program which despite challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic started at the club in 2020. The program is spearheaded by current head coach Caitlin Beresford, and features set training times per week, coaching on the water, dry land training, erging and strength training. The ‘two-stream’ name refers to the different paths a rower can take within the program, with one stream for those who are fairly new to competitive rowing and who’s time commitment is more limited. The second stream is for rowers aspiring to reach national team status and attend elite level regattas.

The second program to debut last year was a high school indoor rowing program, which began in Feb. 2020 with two Orillia high schools. The program involved 19 students total between the two schools and planned to run until the end of April until the pandemic paused the indoor season in mid-March. The hopes of the club were that students would be interested in rowing on the water during the spring and summer after participating in the indoor rowing program.

One of the club’s current priorities is to increase the number of youth members, which coincides with its other newest program. In 2019, a full-scale youth rowing program was started at the club, which they plan on continuing in the Spring of 2022 in the hopes to grow the club and instill a love for rowing in the youths from Orillia. Throughout its history, the club has also run a varsity rowing program with Lakehead University, as well as an intermittent student competitive program. The club has had both masters and students attend the Row Ontario championship regattas and CORA regattas in the summertime in past years and sends rowers to compete at fall regattas such as the Muskoka Fall Classic and the Head of the Trent on a regular basis.

In addition to new and exciting programs, the club also hopes to have a new home on either Lake Simcoe or Lake Couchiching sometime in the near future. They’ve run several creative fundraising initiatives over the last several years to help raise money to complete the move.

“We’ve done a lot of fundraising over the years and one of our priorities that we’ve been working on in recent years has been to relocate the club to a less windy location,” said Pidgen. “We started in 2019 doing major fundraisers, things like a garage sale and a sportathon where people can either walk around the park, erg, or row and make a donation or contribute a minimum amount. Over the years we’ve also approached businesses and people in the community to receive donations. We’ve had a real successful ‘Name an Oar’ program where we’ve had about 80 oars sponsored. The sponsor pays for the total cost of the oar and we also have a program where a sponsor, either a business or an individual, can pay for half of a brand-new boat and name the boat and choose the colour.”

The Orillia Rowing Club is just a few years shy of its 25th anniversary and keeps looking towards the future with new programs and plans to improve their infrastructure. They’ve continuously tried to improve and grow as a club and will be a club to watch in Ontario for many years to come.