Small Club Saturday: Hinsdale Community Rowing

General Club Information:

When was your club founded? Hinsdale Community Rowing was founded in 2016. The founders are Steve and Amy Louis (Burr Ridge, IL) and Gerry and Marian Jablonski (Hinsdale, IL).

What is your club's mission/goals? Our club's goal is to provide a rowing venue for adult scullers in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. We also seek to protect the health and vitality of the beautiful Des Plaines River.

Program Structure:

What initiatives has your club implemented to bring in athletes and participants?

Recruit: Our current members have recruited their friends and fellow rowers.

Google: Our boathouse location has been listed on Google for several years. We have had several members mention that they found us using a Google Maps search. This has been especially helpful for people moving to the area.

Fourth of July Parade: We entered the Hinsdale, IL, 4th of July parade in 2018. Our "float" was a single carried on a car and members walked with oars.

Local Press: Our community magazines and newspapers have provided coverage of our club activities, including Learn To Row and the Headless Oarsman Regatta.

Learn To Row: HCR offers instruction for those who are new to the sport of sculling or who need a refresher after a lengthy time off the water.

Summer Collegiate Rower Memberships: We offer an affordable summer membership for collegiate rowers from May to September.

What programs do you offer and how is the training structured? We offer several Learn To Row classes, which are weekend sessions (Friday to Sunday). We begin with one-on-one instruction in a double and move into one-on-one instruction with the new rower in a single shell with pontoons.

Small Club Tips:

We noticed you have an Earth Day Clean-up – can you say a little bit about this and its importance? We row on a ten-kilometer stretch of the Des Plaines River, which originates near Racine, Wisconsin, and flows through northern Illinois into the Kankakee, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers. Our river supports a healthy wildlife population including bald eagles, great blue herons, beavers, fish, deer, and osprey. However, the river contains an unfortunate level of trash: all forms of plastics, aluminum cans, styrofoam, basketballs, and other human-created detritus. Annually, we schedule an Earth Day Clean Up for our river. Club members walk sections of the riverbank to collect trash, which then is returned to the boathouse via launch and disposed of properly. We typically collect at least 20 large contractor-style trash bags in two hours.

Can you talk about your regatta, "Head of the Headless Oarsman"? Any tips for other small clubs who might want to host their own regatta? The "Head of the Headless Oarsman" is a fall head race for scullers (singles, doubles and quads). This year's race is scheduled on September 26, 2021.

Lastly, is there anything else or small club tips you would like to share about your club that would be beneficial to other clubs and our members? Our club benefits enormously from our ten kilometers of rowable water: easily accessed from many Chicago suburbs, undeveloped and free from competing boat traffic. Additionally, Hinsdale Community Rowing is exclusively a sculling club. This allows members of all skill levels and competitive interests to row together, which supports newer scullers and fosters a shared sense of community & inclusiveness within the club.

For more on Hinsdale Community Rowing, click here.