West Lakes Open Day: Row Club Launches Strong

It’s 7am on a Saturday and you’re strapping your feet onto a rowing machine on the West Lakes foreshore. The coach checking your grip won gold in Tokyo. You came for a workout. You got a lesson most people never get.

That was the West Lakes Row Club Open Day on Saturday 10 May: three coach-led indoor rowing sessions, every seat booked, run the Row Nation way. Interval-based. Small groups. Real coaching on real machines. This is the recap of what the morning looked like, and why the format, not the star power, is the part worth copying.

Olympians set the tone

Leading the sessions were two of Australia’s best: Tokyo 2020 Olympic gold medallists Alex Hill and Lucy Stephan. That’s a gap you can feel. Two of the country’s best rowers, coaching people who’d never taken a stroke. Closing that gap was the whole job of the morning.

The method was plain. Each session ran a structured warm-up into progressive intervals: demonstration first, then real-time feedback, then a pacing cue to hold onto. Watch it, try it, get corrected, go again. In that order the erg stops being a mystery machine and starts being learnable, whether it was someone’s first row or their fiftieth.

“Getting coached by Olympians isn’t something you expect on a Saturday morning. It really helped me understand how to row properly.” (First-time attendee at the Open Day)

Three sessions, ten seats each

Sessions ran at 7:00am, 8:00am and 9:00am, each capped at ten participants. The cap wasn’t a booking limit. It was the coaching plan: ten rowers means the coach sees every stroke, and a stroke that gets seen gets fixed in the moment. With the sunrise coming up over the foreshore, each group worked through drills, sprints and recovery pieces.

The rule on the grass was simple: effort over ego. If you borrow one thing from the format for your own training, borrow that. Warm up properly. Keep the intervals short. Take the recovery seriously, and judge the session by your own effort rather than the screen next to you.

“The format made it easy to follow, and way more enjoyable than I expected.” (Participant feedback from the 8:00 AM session)

Where it went from there

The Open Day rolled into a weekly rhythm, with coach Alexis Dorogi taking sessions on Tuesday evenings and Sunday mornings in the same shape: interval-based, low-impact, guided.

None of it happened without the crew behind it. Thank you to West Lakes Row Club, Rowing SA, and everyone who handled logistics and local outreach. The work behind the scenes matched the effort on the machines.

Back to that 7am start, feet strapped in, an Olympian watching your stroke. Nobody signed up that morning to meet a gold medallist. They signed up to try something, and left knowing what a coached stroke feels like. That feeling is what a Row Club morning is for.

Find a coached session at a Row Club near you →