Pretty poor form that a junior rowing coach gets on this forum and publicly slams his own head coach. A further issue for the program.
I agree i wouldn't say that its a very professional thing to do to either the current head coach or an ex head coach.
You pay to attend the school but unlike all girls schools you don't pay to row. There are girls schools rowing sheds in the same predicament as Grammar currently who pay fair chunks of money on top of their already expensive school fees and they don't criticise, complain about or stop paying the rowing fees if they are losing.
Why?
I don't know anything about school girls rowing, but i do know that the SGS problem is a lot deeper than just losing - and despite what a casual reader of this thread might think, winning is not the test of any successful school sporting program.
As for blame I think there are several issues. As I recall it Vallance had a son who rowed so he must have known what was happening but I doubt he understood the importance of it.
The timeline was that the sports Master came over from Joeys andemployed a 1st XI coach from cricket NSW and a rugby coach with coaching experience at ARC level as well as 1st grade club and high rep level honours. Don't know about the position in cricket but the simple fact is that the 1st XV coach was asleep at the wheel and had no interest in the younger age groups - should have gone years earlier.
My take is that the Sports Master, a former premiership winning SJC cricket coach, recognised the problem in the 2 land based sports and addressed it.
Rowing had always been a special case - they, unlike any other sport, were permitted to run their own fundraising for boats etc.
Whatever were the problems in the shed were postponed from being acted on by the victory in 2011. But to anyone with some knowledge of rowing a short exposure to the disinterest in what was going on in the junior shed was a sure sign to me of big big problems coming down the line: kids were not turning up to training and completely disrupting the training of the crews they were in on a regular basis (every Monday for instance) but because there seemed to be no or limited teacher involvement there were no disciplinary consequences for that.
In defence of Vallance he knew nothing about sport - it took, I think, someone who did to tell him what the problem was. From a rowing point of view they snuck a win just at the right time to persevere with the status quo.