The Harvard Stroke.

In the CRIMSON of October 29 was an article from the Boston Post describing Mr. J. Watson Taylor's ideas of rowing and critic sing the Harvard crews. A representative of the CRIMSON asked Captain Herrick to criticize Mr. Watson-Taylor's article and to explain why our crews do not row like the English crews. He said:

So far as words can describe a stroke Mr. Watson-Taylor's description of the Cambridge stroke is almost exactly what we are now working for in our crew. His criticism of last year's Harvard crew is just and much more accurate than most of the criticisms made upon the crew. The crew undoubtedly recovered badly and finished badly. The faults in the recover were the most telling faults, though perhaps not the most apparent. But Mr. Watson-Taylor has assumed that the crew rowed as Mr. Storrow wished them to; this is distinctly not so. While we had faults that were common to every man, our most glaring faults were individual ones. The men were together but a short time and had been taught to row in about as many different ways as there are men in the boat. There was hardly time after Mr. Storrow got hold of them to get them in anything like a uniform method of rowing. With what little accuracy words can describe any stroke, is plainly shown in Mr. Watson-Taylor's article. His words describe very well what Yale and Harvard try to do, while as a matter of fact Yale and Harvard row very differently from the English crews. This difference is inevitable from the difference in English and American rigs. The Yale and Harvard crews are rigged practically alike. The characteristics of their rigging are the short stretchers, and slides as long as a man naturally can use and varying for each man. In England every stretcher is fixed at an angle of 45 degrees and the exact number of inches the crew can slide fixed by the coach. In the Oxford and Cambridge crews this is from 15 to 151/2 inches, and is exactly the same for a long man as for a short man. The seat is then stopped 1,1/2 inches from the pin toward the bow. The only variable measurement in the whole boat is the distance from the pin to the stretcher. This rignecessitates a longer body-reach and a shorter slide than the American crews use, and causes an inevitable difference between the strokes.