Oakland man’s memoir details coaching early Cal women’s crew team

Words beginning with the letter “R” best portray the primary themes running like rivers through the life of Oakland’s Redwood Heights resident Karl Drlica.

For starters, there’s rowing, the origins of which he describes in a new memoir, “Bitten by the Rowing Bug: Challenges of an Untamed River” (on Amazon at bit.ly/4aTvShc). Drlica’s father was the rowing coach at Oregon State University for 30 years and lured his reluctant teenage son one lazy summer day out of a hammock and into a single scull (racing shell).

The “bug” bit hard for the junior Drlica, now age 81, leading to a lifetime of aquatic adventures that included leaving his home in Corvallis, Oregon, to attend UC Berkeley in 1965 as a molecular biology graduate student. There, he found a community of rowers at Oakland’s nearby Lake Merritt, resumed rowing and crossed paths with fellow graduate student Art Sachs (150w.berkeley.edu/cal-womens-crew-pre-title-ix).

Together, they reimagined the capabilities of women athletes and began coaching Cal’s pre-Title IX women’s crew team (before the mid-1960s, UC Berkeley had a “Women’s Boat Club” established in 1900, but whether it lasted past the 1920s is unclear).

Believing physical conditioning would most quickly lead the novice rowers to the rewards of winning races, they developed a strict on-land training regime that had the women doing upper body exercises and running the hills in Oakland and Berkeley to build power and endurance (150w.berkeley.edu/cal-womens-rowing-history).

The “R’s” continued to pop up like signposts as Drlica and Sachs battled for recognition, resources and respect for the women rowers from the university’s physical education department. It was an era when patriarchal attitudes said women risked physical harm if allowed to sweat, female athletes lacked the will and stamina for extreme physical exertion and the university’s financial resources were for male athletes only. To raise money, the two coaches resorted to rummaging through computer lab garbage cans for punch cards that could be sold for a few cents per pound to a recycling center in Oakland.

By far the most dramatic “R” arrived in 2018. While researching and writing about his early life and his father’s historic establishment of women’s rowing in Oregon — which most of the memoir is about — Drlica joined the Berkeley Paddling and Rowing Club.

After practicing for two years, he signed up to enter the club’s 3,000-meter time trial, hoping to beat a 17:39 single scull time he’d used as a training marker. He finished with a disappointing 18:22, rowing mostly by reflexive muscle memory because he was actually having a life-threatening heart attack at the time.

After the race, while waiting to dock his racing shell, he collapsed, tipped over and remained underwater, his feet caught in the boat. Two rowers dove in and extricated him, other people lifted him onto the dock, someone ran for the club’s defibrillator, a doctor and the parent of a young paddler began chest compressions, and Dr. Jean Hayward, a pediatric neurology physician and rower, administered CPR.

Hayward shocked him three times with the defibrillator and provided mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Eventually, emergency medical technicians arrived and took Drlica to a hospital where he was intubated and heavily sedated for four days. Exploratory surgery revealed the need for an immediate triple bypass. After a month in the hospital, he retuned home and resumed working on his memoir.

“I have no PTSD or memory of the incident,” Drlica said in a recent interview. “I have no fear of the water. I row 4 miles a day, and I hate it when someone passes me because I’m still competitive.”

In a separate interview, Hayward, a 35-year resident of Oakland’s Rockridge district who recently retired after 31 years working the Kaiser Permanente medical group, said Drlica had “clearly drowned, and it was obvious what I needed to do.” Subsequently, she said the two have become “pretty good friends.”

Hayward began rowing in 1974, two years after passage of Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits gender-based discrimination in education programs and activities that receive federal funding.

She grew up in Los Angeles, excelling at water sports and playing basketball as a center because she was the tallest athlete on a team with shorter students. Hoping to play in college, she went to a basketball tryout and realized she couldn’t compete at a high level. Seeing a sign asking “Want to Row?” she thought it sounded fun and signed on.

“It was about 20 women who stuck with it. Early hours and hard workouts caused attrition. The coach was a quiet guy who whipped us into shape without yelling or histrionics. We ran the fire trials, a 5-mile uphill run. We ran stadium steps, which I hated. We learned to row.”

Hayward recalls the men’s team was not welcoming.