Some support would be good

It is for the best that one of the greatest sports at Cal State Long Beach receives as little support as possible.

Rowing may be one of the most prominent activities on the East Coast as well as overseas, but thankfully it is unheard of in the Daily Forty-Niner and receives almost no financial support in comparison with other sports on campus.

The crew at CSULB and its rowers really do not deserve any amount of recognition - especially any to be seen in print. After all, a rower only begins his or her day at 4:30 a.m. as an alarm goes off in the chilly pre-dawn hours.

The day that is barely even born has only to offer an intensive physical workout that will push the individual beyond what he or she knows was possible.

Having reached complete physical exhaustion by the time most other students are rolling out of bed, the rower heads for the shower room and prepares for the begining of the rest of the day.

The rower always keeps in mind that he or she must make time to return again in the afternoon in order to get a seat on the boat. Rowers have 12 to 18 units each semester and about 70 percent work at least 15 hours a week.

This lousy thing they call life only continues from mid-September through the end of May. Rowers get a whole two weeks off for Christmas and spend every other holiday with mandatory workouts twice a day while leading up to their competitions.

The rowers compete in meets [regattas] throughout California. At some of their regattas, they compete against Americans from every corner, Canadians and Europeans to name a few. This is barely respectable and surely undeserving of any newspaper coverage.

Do not feel sorry for rowers. Besides the three- and four-mile intensive weight circuits, long hours spent rowing on the rowing machines and on the water, not to mention school, work and other extracurricular activities, they really do not have much else to worry about. It is not as if they do not have time to do their own fund raising.

Because crew is a club sport and is not funded by the school, rowers are rewarded with semester dues of $150 to $250, not including their travel expenses that exceeded $500 last year. To add a little more of a challenge to their pathetic lives, if they want to purchase a new boat to race in, they only have to raise an extra $25,000.

The current boats the crew teams in are an average of four-years old. However, the schools they race against are funded and receive new boats every other year. It is obvious that Long Beach's crew teams are financially stable.

By now it is clear and understood why the crew teams receive no support. They have obviously done nothing to deserve it. Newspaper coverage of the regattas and monetary gifts are clearly not a necessity for this group of athletes.

Besides the unbearable mornings at 5 a.m., intense physical pain that makes stair steps impossible, financial draining and 9 p.m. bed times, there are numerous other gifts they receive.

Rowers develop organizational skills and budgeting of time that can be learned nowhere else. Friendships are made that will last longer than any lifetime because each of them have shared the same sufferings and triumphs.

Rowers get the chance to experience a smog-free sunrise on glassy water and the muffled sound of oars sweeping through the water simultaneously as they pass under bridges.

Does this sound like a sport that deserves attention of any form? If their motto really is "if it doesn't kill us, it will only make us stronger," then it will not hurt them to go one more season without support.

Sara Barton is a public relations major at CSULB.