Transcript: Bryans previews Big Ten championships
May 14, 2014 | Women's Rowing
May 14, 2014
MADISON, Wis. -- Wisconsin head coach Bebe Bryans addressed the media on Monday at Camp Randall Stadium to preview this Sunday's Big Ten rowing championships set for Eagle Creek Park in Indianapolis. A full transcript follows.
THE MODERATOR: The No. 15 ranked Wisconsin women's rowing team heads to Eagle Creek Park in Indianapolis for the Big Ten Championships on Sunday. The Badgers will take on six Big Ten rivals in hopes of securing one of the 11 automatic bids to the NCAA Championships that comes along with winning the Big Ten title.
Head Coach Bebe Bryans is here. We'll have an opening statement and then take questions.
COACH BRYANS: It's hard to believe that it's this time of year already. The season has just gone by really quickly, and part of that is because, as Coach Clark said earlier, we've only been on the water for about 28 days, give or take.
That being said, I think we're -- we've had a really great campaign. We've had a really great season and have done a lot of really good work to get to this point. This team is getting faster every time we hit the water.
That obviously is critical, but for Wisconsin to be successful at this sport, once we do hit the water, we need to take advantage of every single stroke. It's an advantage that we have, I think. It's sort of our secret weapon.
We don't always use that secret weapon very well, but I think this year we have so far, and we're really looking forward to being really competitive at the Big Tens this weekend and hopefully earn the opportunity to go on.
Q. Is there any substitute for actually getting out on the water?
COACH BRYANS: No. There isn't. It's just one of those sports where you have to be in -- even in the specific hull you're going to be rowing, each boat feels a little bit different.
And one of the big challenges of getting on the water so late is trying your best to make sure you've got the right people in the right seats in the right boat. And the more consistent your athletes are, the easier it is for us to help them find their right seats. And they've done a really good job of that this year, of bringing it consistently, practice to practice to practice.
So, again, there is no substitute, but you can get an awful lot of really hard work done in the wintertime, and I'll put our toughness and our fitness up against anybody.
Q. Bebe, could you maybe relate to what Chris is going through a little bit? I could almost sense you cringing back there a couple of times. I'm guessing you've been in his shoes before. Are you kind of a sounding board for him right now? What is because you guys share that facility?
COACH BRYANS: Well, it's funny, what I was thinking back there was you can only imagine having an office right next to Chris. I'm the luckiest coach in the world, actually.
But, honestly, we -- I am really fortunate to be able to work next to Chris and next to his staff as well as my own. I think it's remarkable, and it's something that helps us both.
We call it talking each other off the ledge. So I'll walk over into his office, if I'm having a bad day, and he'll talk me off the ledge, and vice versa. In fact, I didn't have practice with my boat this morning because we're in finals. So everybody's at different practice times. And I went out with some of the other women's boats and just rowed along with that coach, and then I stayed out and just sort of tagged along with Chris' practice. We got a chance to do that and then got a chance to talk a little bit about it afterwards.
Just having that sounding board is really helpful.
Do I know what he's going through? Oh, yeah. Yes, absolutely. And I've been where he is, and he's been in a much -- he's a national champion coach here not that long ago. So he's run the gamut of it.
We live and breathe this team. We feel every ounce of what each other is going through.
Q. One would guess that your expectations for your team might be at the other end of the spectrum as far as his expectations. Yes, he wants them to be well prepared and everything like that, but you go into this meet with higher expectations for what your team could do, correct?
COACH BRYANS: That is correct. Yeah. And I think you never know -- this is the best team we've ever had on paper. So that's pretty exciting for us. It's a young team. I have one senior in the varsity eight. I have two sophomores in the varsity eight that walked on this team last year. Of the varsity eight, there's one recruited athlete in it. In the second varsity eight, there's one recruited athlete in it. The rest were walk ons.
And what we do here with our walk on athletes is remarkable. Nobody else does this. Nobody else competes at the level that we compete at with the walk on athletes filling out those top level boats.
So obviously the recruits are doing a really good job of helping our walk ons come up a little bit faster.
We started out a little bit rocky. We raced before we really practiced, and that's sort of our -- that's our reality. In fact, we'd gone across country twice and raced in the middle once before the docks went in here.
So needless to say -- one of the coaches that we were racing against -- we went out to Clemson for basically a really big regatta. It was pretty fun. And the first day we didn't do very well, and the second day we were really good.
And I talked to the coach from Syracuse. And he said, People were saying, what's been up with Wisconsin? I said, they've been on the water for an extra day now. They actually doubled their water time from yesterday to today. And that was the truth.
So I have -- I'm really optimistic that this crew is going to bring what they can do. How good that is, we're going up against the defending national champions. So we're going to race those guys. They're going to have to be better than us to win. So I'm pretty excited about that.
Q. Paul Capobianco writes: The Big Ten is loaded this season. So is it loaded this season?
COACH BRYANS: It is loaded this season. Good job, Paul.
Obviously we do have the defending national champion in Ohio State. That was exciting. All of the Big Ten coaches wanted to be the first team to win that National Championship. Fortunately for Coach Teitelbaum, he was the one that got it done. But we were all really excited that that finally happened because it showed the strength that this conference has. And we've been knocking on the door for a long time.
As coaches, we got together and made some changes in our conference schedule to better facilitate a good performance at the NCAAs. But Michigan is really strong again this year. Indiana has figured some things out, and they're actually probably going to be seeded third going into the championship. I think we're going to be seeded probably fourth going into the championship.
So seeds are sort of like how good we are on paper. They don't get you much on race day. But I would say this is one of if not the strongest Big Ten fields that we've had in a really long time.
Q. If memory serves me right too, Bebe, it seems like your teams keep getting better as the season moves along. You're seeing that with this team too?
COACH BRYANS: Absolutely. I think last year was a great learning moment for us. Last year we really finished poorly. It was a very similar situation to this year as far as water time goes. It was a really tough winter and a late spring. And I thought we were a lot better than we ended up being.
Just the performance that we put out at NCAAs really wasn't very good. It wasn't very strong. Not for lack of effort, it's just the way it turned out.
And this current group of athletes really finally really learned from that experience, and they owned it and they took ownership of their part in it.
I think that's really helped us get over -- hopefully, over this little tipping point we're at, where we've been pretty good for a long time and now we want to be really good.
We had a transfer student come in at the semester, and she's really helped us out. Her name is Gill Cooper, and she is stroking our varsity eight right now. It's just been a little bit of a catalyst to help us see, to help her teammates see how good we could really be if we perform the way we're set up to perform.
And so I think that's really encouraging and the combination of those things and just having that confidence to know that every day you can get better is what we're -- it's what we count on and hopefully what we become known for again.
