Ginny Gilder, the author of “Course Correction: A Story of Rowing and Resilience in the Wake of Title IX,” grew up in the Northeast. She was brought back over the summer for the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival, and returned again to regale attendees at a book signing at Bunch of Grapes in Vineyard Haven on Friday.
“If I had come here [to the Vineyard] when I was younger, I would never have moved out West,” Ms. Gilder joked. She now resides in Seattle, where she is co-owner of the WNBA’s Seattle Storm, a professional women’s basketball team, and CEO of an investment company she founded.
Ms. Gilder is also an Olympic silver medalist, after winning as part of the American women’s quadruple sculls team at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and is obviously passionate about sports. Despite always being a writer (she decided to write a novel at the tender age of 11), “writing was not on my career path,” she said. That is, until less than a decade ago, when just after turning 50, Ms. Gilder decided to return to rowing, and in turn writing.
A memoir, “Course Correction” recounts the physical, psychological, and technological barriers Ms. Gilder overcame to achieve success in the sport. Heart rate monitors did not exist during Gilder’s youthful rowing career. Rowing machines in clubs had not been invented. An exemplar of clear goal orientation and focus, Ms. Gilder came to realize that changes in rowing training meant that there was the potential to use new resources to change her rowing — and her experience of rowing. When she came back to the sport, the one thing she most wanted to change was “how terrified I felt at the start of each race.” To that end, along with her rowing coach, she worked with a sports psychologist upon her return.
Ms. Gilder, then in her 40s, spent six months building up to a race that she had to win to make it to the finals. But due to a combination of circumstances, win she did not: “My time was terrible. My rowing was terrible. I did something I had never done before. I quit.”
Ms. Gilder laughs as she bluntly states, “I have a medal. I don’t care. I should have had passion on one of those lists I made. I was reminded how important it is to love what you do.” And she realized that she wasn’t loving it.
When Ms. Gilder told her sports psychologist about her decision to quit, he predicted that “this might not turn out the way you think it will.”
And he was right.
She remembered what rowing had once given her, and was inspired to do something old, but new: write about her breakthrough earlier experiences as a woman athlete, and the ways her life had unfolded from them.
“Course Correction” is not a typical sports memoir, she admits. “It’s more like dream, struggle, struggle, setback, success,” Ms. Gilder says. “There’s a lot of non-sports stuff. There’s sad stuff. I connect best when I understand the struggles of people’s lives. I don’t sit up there and think, ‘Oh, I am an Olympic athlete.’
“We hide our failures and it keeps us separated,” Ms. Gilder believes. She felt that if she could “share my failures, maybe it would help others. Who might have dreams they felt they might not be able to deliver on?”
The book focuses on Title IX, federal legislation introduced in 1972 that required that every educational institution provide equal access for women — including access to sports. Ms. Gilder first began rowing when she became enthused after seeing a race on the Charles River. “I did not see their faces,” she says wryly. “So I did not know what agony they were in.”
Soon after, to her utter surprise, she made the newly created Yale women’s rowing team. The team was run by two women athletes who were preparing for the 1976 Olympics, the first opportunity for women to compete in rowing. Ms. Gilder, only 17 years old at the time, had no inkling she would become part of history. But she did know the training conditions and facilities for women athletes at the time were, shall we say, non-optimal.
Due to New England’s icy climate, the men and women’s rowing teams practiced on the water until mid-November and worked out indoors until late winter or early spring. By mid-February, when the ice broke up, the rowers eagerly went back to the water. Both teams were bused over for practice. But after the strenuous practice, the 35 women on the crew sat soaking wet waiting in the bus as the guys showered off in the two men-only shower stalls and changed. There were no facilities for women.
When the women’s crew staged a protest in a college official’s office in which they historically bared all to reveal the reminder, with Title IX painted on their backs, a New York Times reporter was snapping away.
The photo went viral, and alums responded, “Get those girls a shower.’”
Title IX was the beginning of a new access to opportunity for women in sports and beyond, which Ms. Gilder helped define, and details in her book: “It happened in an instant. It had taken years. It would last forever.”
“Course Correction: A Story of Rowing and Resilience in the Wake of Title IX,” by Ginny Gilder. Beacon Press, 2015, 272 pages. Available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Bunch of Grapes.