DOUG CLARK

By: Richard Garver

Doug Clark, who helped transform Riverside Boat Club in the 1980s as a coach and organizational advisor, passed away in Guelf, Ontario at the age of 84 on December 21, 2022.

Doug had a passion for rowing.  After medaling as a Canadian National Team sculler, he detoured from his career in the investment business to become a professional coach.  Named Canada’s Rowing Coach of the Year in 1975, he went on to coaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania and at M.I.T.

In 1982, Riverside’s leadership, President Rufus Perkins, Jim Hanley, and Will Melcher, proposed to accelerate the club’s recovery from near extinction by hiring a paid coach.  If adopted, it would make Riverside the only club on the river that offered professional coaching.  Because such a hire would not only break with the club’s all-volunteer tradition but would require raising dues to $75 to cover the cost of the coach’s salary, the idea was vigorously opposed by its old guard.  Undaunted, Hanley, provided an introduction by Ted van Dusen, approached Clark, then M.I.T.’s head women’s coach and whose lightweight women’s eight had recently won the national championship, about the position.  As it happened, he and Tech’s athletic department were in conflict about the program’s future.  Clark agreed to coach Riverside the following summer for $15 an hour. 

 When he arrived at the boathouse for his first day of work on May 20, 1983, Clark was confronted by a member of the old regime who threatened to assault him if he returned the next day.  Faced with such pockets of hostility and with the resignations of some resentful members but supported by Hanley, Melcher, Bob Cutler, and others with ambitions for the club, Clark’s strategy was to overcome nay-sayers by attracting young, competitive rowers drawn to his vision for the club: Riverside would produce the best club rowers on the river.  His stated ambition was that Riverside would be represented in the 1984 Los Angles and 1988 Seoul Olympics by individuals and entire boats.  To that end, the club purchased an ergometer and installed it in the first-floor changing area (now the women’s locker room).  Members found that winter indoor training not only improved performances but increased camaraderie. 

Jim Hanley succeeded Rufus Perkins as president in 1983.  With Northeastern University’s lease of two bays and the second floor of the boathouse set to expire at the end of December, he, Clark, and others like Charlie Osborn dedicated themselves to making Riverside self-sustaining by attracting ambitious men and women with a club philosophy of rowing excellence.  Clark introduced novice, junior, elite, and masters sculling programs.  The club bought used college equipment and initiated a sweeps program.  He coached both scullers and sweep rowers on weekday mornings and afternoons.  On Saturday he held a novice sculling clinic.  He introduced a sculling ladder and oriented training to competing in Canadian Henley and the Head of the Charles.  

 Riverside was soon making progress at the novice and intermediate levels, sweeping the Bay State Games sculling competition.  To secure his leadership of Riverside’s rowing program once and for all, he determined to settle the matter on the water.  The leading rowers from the opposition camp would race his protégés Melcher, John Marden, Kevin Galie, and Michael Coor in quads on the Power House stretch, the winner to be granted the use of the club’s prize Stamphli in upcoming competitions.  The losers would be relegated to its slower Pocock.  In effect, it was a race for preeminence in the club.  Rowing the Stamphli in the first race, Clark’s antagonists won by a length.  Switching boats, they lost by two to three lengths.  Returning their boat to its rack, they receded from the club. 

Clark proved to be a great recruiter.  The figure he cut on the river bespoke his pride in imparting rowing skill to Riverside rowers.  Will Melcher remembers him announcing through his megaphone as he motored past boats from Union or Cambridge, “We will bury you,” all the while offering them helpful tips.  Soon a number of their members were joining Riverside to get the benefit of his coaching.  In particular, Clark’s instruction, his programs and Riverside’s new-found support for women began to attract enthusiastic rowers like Maria Lane and Molly Hoyle to his elite group. 

With Riverside’s professional coaching and its growing range of programs generating growing interest, the club came to a cross-roads.  Once Northeastern departed for its new boathouse, it could attempt to replace the university’s revenue by incurring the costs needed to attract additional rowers with new equipment and enhanced programs, with the goal of becoming the dominant Charles River rowing club, or it could retain its niche as a small, local sculling club, with the implication that the lost revenue would be replaced from other sources.  Tufts University showed interest in becoming a tenant. 

 Board meetings grew contentious.  Hanley credited Clark and his background in business management with teaching him how to navigate what both of them expected to be a turbulent decision-making process.  In his dual role as coach and club manager, he contributed not only dynamic teaching but a template for a revitalized organization, including a strengthened committee structure.  In addition to the standing Membership and Regatta Committees required by the constitution, nine others would report to the board, including equipment, maintenance, history/archives, building, grounds, and social committees.  He suggested strategies for coping with the stresses that could be anticipated from the changes underway, such as the appointment of Strategic Planning Committee of eighteen club members, to be charged with assessing the club’s membership structure and fees, equipment needs, physical plant, and possible new income-producing ventures; with drafting goals for the club; and with developing short- and long-term recommendations for putting it on a self-sustaining basis. 

By the spring of 1984, Northeastern had vacated the boathouse’s second floor, Riverside’s membership had virtually doubled to 141, a waiting list had to be instituted, and the club was solvent.  Organizational changes kept pace.  Board meetings now had formal agendas.  Improved governance and the evolving composition of the club’s membership began to transform the club’s culture.  Although Clark found that many of its newer male members tended to be, in his words, “too cool” to engage in Hanley and Melcher’s program to revive Riverside, women like Anna Jones, Maria Lane and Lynn Osborn enthusiastically supported his emphasis on “rowing better than anyone else on the Charles” and that they brought “energy, passion and commitment” to the organization. 

With Clark refining their technique, six Riverside scullers traveled to the 1984 Canadian Henley, medaling in the junior and senior lightweight single.  Ted van Dusen and Dennis Ruane narrowly missed selection as the U.S. Olympic double.  In the Head of the Charles Regatta Ned Cooke had the club’s highest finish, third in the club single. John Marden placed fourth in the championship single.  There was a palpable sense of excitement about Riverside’s future. 

1985 was its breakthrough year.  Riverside confirmed its transformation to an ambitious, growing organization dedicated to high quality rowing, both sculling and sweeps, by medaling in regional races from New England to Philadelphia and finishing third in the National Championships team points trophy behind Vesper and NYAC, with wins in the senior lightweight double (Ted Marks and Rick Gales), senior heavyweight double (John Marden and Bill Randall), intermediate lightweight single (Ted Marks) and the mixed double.  Clark took a large contingent to the Canadian Henley, where the club won nine women’s events, including six junior sculling titles.   Each woman sculler placed in the top three in her event, among them Carey Beth (C. B.) Sands, a future United States Rowing Hall of Fame member, who won the junior and senior lightweight women’s single.  She and Ruth Kennedy won the junior and senior lightweight double and Izzie Gordon, Deb Fine, Maria Lane, and Mary Anczarski’s quad placed second.  On the men’s side, Will Melcher, Vaclav Stejekal, Bill Randall and Ted Marks won the championship quad, while Dan Chernoff and Jeff Parks won not only the junior but the senior lightweight double event.  The club had inaugurated a long run of success at the Henley regatta.  The transformation of Riverside begun by Jim Hanley, Doug Clark and their supporters was confirmed that fall in the Head of the Charles Regatta.  Although the race organization does not have records confirming the winner of the 1985 regatta points trophy, Clark cherished the memory of Harry Parker pulling alongside Riverside’s dock to congratulate him and the club on winning it, the first non-collegiate organization ever to do so.

With developments like these reinforcing the proposition that the club could survive without Northeastern’s income, the board formally voted not to replace the university with another tenant.  It would go it alone.  In 1986, Jim Hanley announced he would step down as president at the end of the year and Doug Clark returned to Canada to coach its national team’s quad.  Nevertheless, as Riverside concluded its fall racing season, it had a robust management structure in place, a multiplicity of programs and a membership that had grown substantially. 

Clark, exhibiting the same coaching and management acumen that he had brought to Riverside, went on to a long and successful career in business consulting.  He never lost his passion for the club, however.  He stayed in regular touch with its leadership, from Jim Hanley, Will Melcher, and Maria Lane to Lynn Osborn, and visited as recently as last year, as eager as ever for news about the health and exploits of the organization to which he had contributed so much.  As for those he mentored like Maria Lane, they remember him with great fondness: “Doug was a brilliant organizer with club service going hand in hand with rowing.  Charting that course was exciting and intrinsically we are on the same one today.  Doug’s vision matched his passion and dedication. He treasured his time at Riverside. His legacy remains.”  To Lynn Osborn, “Doug’s spirit and love of rowing and community will live on in us.  We will continue to celebrate his remarkable life and gifts.”