The ROWING NEWS Interview: Michael Callahan

University of Washington—and U.S. National Team—alumnus Michael Callahan coached both crews to historic success this year, after both had off years in 2023. Callahan, who had coached at least one crew to an IRA title in every year of his now 18-year tenure as the Huskies’ head men’s coach, got shut out by the sweep of chief rival Cal, while the U.S. National Team men’s eight failed to qualify for the Olympics at the 2023 World Rowing Championships.

Casey Galvanek selected the 2024 crew of nine who trained at clubs like California Rowing Club before coming together under chief coach Josy Verdonkschot’s U.S. National Team system.

Callahan coached the men’s eight in Seattle before taking them to Lucerne, Switzerland, for the Final Olympic and Paralympic Qualifying Regatta in May, where they earned a spot in the Paris Games. Callahan then led his Washington Huskies to a sweep—winning every men’s heavyweight event—of the IRA National Championship Regatta in New Jersey, where he remained to continue coaching the Olympic eight before the Huskies went to Henley, where they advanced to the Sunday final of the Grand Challenge Cup. The men’s Olympic eight won bronze in Paris under Callahan’s tutelage, the first Olympic medal for U.S. men since Beijing 2008.

Rowing News: You are known as the Washington men’s varsity head coach, but you were quite an oarsman yourself, even before attending Washington, winning the 1992 World Rowing Junior Championships in the eight at Montreal. How did you come to rowing?

Michael Callahan: I had humble beginnings like many people have in rowing. I was playing a lot of sports and I broke my hand playing baseball when my dad was stationed at the Pentagon and I found rowing in my high school and something really resonated in me right away. My first time rowing ever was with Charlie Butt, the father of the Harvard coach [Charley Butt]. He took me out in a Pocock wherry double, and I rowed in a big circle on the Potomac River right above the Key Bridge and that was the beginning of my rowing career.

And, like most, rowing changed my life, and I’m happy to be in this business still.

Rowing News: And then you ended up in Seattle, when Washington was really coming back as a national force in rowing.

Michael Callahan: Yeah, I rowed four years in high school, playing other sports, and had made a junior team and done well enough to be recruited back to Washington. At one point my family had lived out here when my dad was stationed at Bangor submarine base, so I knew about the Great Pacific Northwest and the University of Washington and I was fortunate to be recruited by them.

Bob Ernst had taken the program over a few years earlier from Dick Erickson, and they were on the climb to national prominence. I always tell people I graduated [in 1996] as Bobby Cummins came in to stroke the boat and they won, so that was definitely an upgrade [laughs]. We had been building up, getting closer and closer to the national championship, and that year was the first women’s NCAA championship, and we hadn’t won the IRA I think since ‘71, so 1997 was a phenomenal year for the University of Washington, and everyone’s really proud of what was accomplished that year, the whole boathouse.

Rowing News: You worked at the Head of the Charles years ago?

Michael Callahan: I went to try out for the National Team in Princeton right after I graduated, and worked there for a while and then I took a year off in 2001 when I didn’t make the Olympic team in 2000, and one of my good friends hired me back to the Head of Charles to do an internship, and it was a great experience actually to look at the business of rowing and not just the rowing part as an oarsman or as a coach. I got to get insight of what it takes to run a regatta, what it takes to get sponsorship, and see really what happens behind the curtain of running a major regatta.

Rowing News: The last time I saw you it was the last day at the Olympics and you had just coached the U.S. men’s eight to a bronze medal, the first medal in men’s Olympic rowing for the U.S. since 2008. That was the cap of quite a summer for you.

Michael Callahan: What a phenomenal performance by those athletes and the whole team. I’m certainly very grateful to have had a small part in that. I was coaching at the very end but when I think about the bigger picture, these guys had been training for this for many, many years, and it started off in their home clubs, maybe at Rose City or New Trier or CRI, and here they were on one of the biggest stages in sports and performing at a really high level. I’m definitely really grateful that they thought of me as someone who could help them achieve something and just one piece of Josy’s and Casey’s team to put it together. So I’m definitely really proud of that group, and something I’ll look back on very fondly for the rest of my life.

Rowing News: You’re had a lot of success coaching various National Teams in addition to the University of Washington. You’ve run a lot of under-23 camps that have won medals. Josy called this Olympic cycle a constellation of coaches who were stimulating each other to bring out the best. How?

Michael Callahan: It’s really important if we want to have great teams, we have to model being in great teams. I really appreciate that Josy gave me the opportunity to help coach this boat, but the other part was a big group of people that coached them. Think about their whole Olympic cycle: there’s quite a few people that contributed, Mike Teti and Skip Kielt and Tom Terhaar and Steve Gladstone. There’s quite a few people that had an input on this all, and there were a lot of lessons learned, and the culmination was them performing and winning an Olympic medal. So I agree with Josy and I think it’s something that in American rowing, if we want to elevate toward the Olympic Games, we’re going to have to obviously collaborate with each other and use all the best resources and all our best skills that we all bring. Again, I was very fortunate to be there at the end but many, many people had inputs in this performance of the team.

Rowing News: Talk specifically about the technique and the style of that men’s eight. They did have a distinctive look to the power phase of their stroke. Is that something you coached very intentionally with this group of guys?

Michael Callahan: Yeah, with Josy coming in and Casey’s direction, there was definitely a direction of how we wanted them, a vision of how we wanted the men’s sweep team to row. If you look at the style, it is closer to Rosenberg style: a lot of seat speed at the bow, leaving the trunk forward and braced, and then bringing the trunk with speed off the back of the legs and a lot of elbow speed back to the bow. It was very sequential that way. A lot like building speed and building momentum to the bow. That was set out, and then we just tried to reinforce it all summer and to improve it, and refine it—which we did and the guys did. There is more work that could be done, but that’s for the next Olympic cycle.

Rowing News: You had a wide range of body types of the eight oarsmen in the Olympic eight. I know you’re a big user of the Peach system, electronics in general, and measurement of things that can’t necessarily be seen by the human eye every time. You rigged each seat individually, and there were quite some differences there. Is that something you carried over from the University of Washington? Is that something you can do more with elite athletes?

Michael Callahan: Yeah, it’s a great point. One of the biggest performance improvements in rowing right now is onboard telemetry. You’re seeing it everywhere from high-school rowing to collegiate rowing to elite rowing. I only saw two boats have the telemetry system on their boats in Paris, and that was us and the British [who won the gold]. Maybe other people did, but they were the only two I saw. We used that information. We had a few different heights, different body proportions, and we were trying to optimize each person’s physiology and optimize each person’s rowing stroke. Those systems allow us to have insight on our length, power, impulse, what have you. So, yeah, there is a lot of individual rigging going on per seat, but then the culmination has to be some kind of alchemy between people. The style, the rowing, the mindset, and other things help bring it all together. But, yeah, each seat was quite a bit different. There was a lot of individual rigging and it helped optimize each person, which I think we’ll see more of in the future. This is only the beginning. Now that we have more of a scientific insight on where forces are in the boat, positive and negative, we can optimize our sport, similar to what cycling has done.

Rowing News: Were you able to do that with this crew specifically because, as you said at media day, these nine guys were the most detail-oriented, obsessive crew you’d ever worked with?

Michael Callahan: Yeah, it was the atmosphere that Josy brought and Casey also brings. All of us had a common vision, it was collective, with different guys with different heights and different abilities. The guys really believed that it was very specific to them, and we were optimizing each of them.

This group was fantastic to coach, very inquisitive, very interested in learning about how they were going to improve and very down to each detail—which was quite challenging as a coach! But it made everyone better and everyone have a stronger understanding of what we’re trying to achieve as a unit and not just individually. So it was a culmination of things. It has to be a cumulative environment and one that everyone believes in what’s happening.

Rowing News: Is one of the things it was a culmination of a lot of Husky rowers? Nine UW athletes on the U.S. Olympic roster and 11 total medals won by Huskies at the Olympics?

Michael Callahan: We’re definitely really proud of that, how many Huskies, men and women, made the Olympic and Paralympic team this summer. It’s something we recruited to, it’s something we told a lot of young people when they were in high school: We would help them reach their Olympic dream and help them develop toward it. We have one current student-athlete, Logan Ullrich, coming back, who won an Olympic silver medal in the New Zealand four. That’s quite exciting. And then we had a lot of alumni. Something we value is that if you want to row at the highest level, we’re telling people ‘Come to Washington; we’ll help you achieve that.’ This is where rowers come to row, and we don’t want to be the end spot of most people’s career. We want it to be a place where you develop and move on and reach even higher things as you graduate from this program.

Rowing News: It was quite a summer for Husky rowing, even before the Paris Games. Your men’s varsity eight were finalists in the Grand Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta. That’s an event for Olympic crews, not college crews. What were you doing there?

Michael Callahan: We had an opportunity. It’s an Olympic year. So usually, you’re right, most years Olympic-level folks go and race in the Grand Challenge Cup. With the Olympics being in Paris and close to that date, those crews did not come. We were fortunate enough to win the IRA National Championship, and I posed it to those guys. I told them it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to race, have a chance to compete and also to maybe even prevail at the Henley Royal Regatta in that event. And they took on that challenge, which I really appreciate. Traditionally, most colleges race in the Ladies Plate, and the Temple Challenge Cup. We opted out to go to the highest-level bracket, and I really respect the fact that our guys took it on.

Rowing News: You took a very different crew to Henley in 2023, a very young crew. Can Henley be a development trip as well as a reward trip?

Michael Callahan: We’ve used it both directions. We’ve used it to help develop our team who’s younger and need to have race experience. It’s match racing, and if you continue down the bracket, you get a lot of racing experience. And that’s really valuable. It also extends your training for a couple of weeks into the summer. So for some years, the investment is you’re trying to build and develop young people into better racers and continue their training.

And then this year, it was more of a reward trip. To take an entire varsity eight is actually very difficult in this day and time. Most students that really have the Olympics or a national team on their mind want to go race for their nation. So they’re going to the Under-23 World Championship or the Senior World Championship. This year, since the Olympics were early, the Under-23 World Championship was late. So it opened the door to send more of our better guys to Henley. So it was a more of a reward trip and also maybe a pinnacle trip. We had been in the Grand Challenge Cup in 2013 and made the final. We won in 1977, we went into that event in 1978 and 1984, so it’s not something you’re able to do very often, and that’s why it was worth doing. And we’re only going to be better this season because of it.

Rowing News: If you’re going to be better this year, that’s trouble for everyone else because you swept the 2024 IRA. How did you feel as that regatta unfolded?

Michael Callahan: It’s really nice as a coach, there’s nothing you’re more proud of then when you see people performing at their pinnacle on the day that you’re training for. I heard an Olympic gymnast say, ‘My average has to be good enough.’ And that Olympic gymnast won an Olympic gold medal. You have to have trained to such a high standard that you might not have your best race on the final day, it might be just an average day for you or a little below average. That still has to be at a high enough standard to be able to win or to medal. At the IRA, the team, from top to bottom, were hitting on all cylinders—those days are always really fun. We had really great cohesion across the whole boathouse, and people bought in.

You train for something for that many years and it all unfolds. And you let the athletes do their thing. They’re trained and they’re confident enough to perform at that level. There’s nothing you can be more proud of.

The post The ROWING NEWS Interview: Michael Callahan appeared first on Rowing News.