Today as part of Women in Sport Week we take a look at one of our most popular participation initiatives ‘Women on the Water’ which allows women to access learn to row and recreational rowing at any age.

River, Coastal and Offshore clubs can provide a 6 or 8-week programme to female adult beginners. The programme is one session per week with a trained instructor.

The programme includes use of the rowing machine, progressing to the water with drills and exercises that will gets the participants comfortable with the rowing stroke. This programme is for adult females looking to start the sport recreationally. Participants must be over 18, but no one is too old to start!

Rowing is an excellent sport to take up recreationally as it brings you outdoors in nature, is a whole body movement, a form of resistance exercise which is great for your muscles and bones and the club is a social community setting. Clubs can add depth to their membership by running a WOW programme as it improves social connections and diversity in your membership which may improve volunteerism and membership takings amongst other benefits.

What Rowing Ireland assists with:

  • Administrative support with sign ups
  • T shirts for all participants and coaches
  • Financial model – whether your coaches will deliver the programme voluntarily or paid coaches (club decides whether they want to make more or less profit)
  • Documents such as 6 and 8 week training programmes, agreement forms, information sheets for participants
  • Media support gathering videos and images of the course for promotion of the clubs programme

Where to sign up: If you are a woman reading this who would like to sign up to a programme please wait until next week March 17th when we will post all available programmes on the Rowing Ireland website. If you wish to join a mailing list about the programmes email your name to womeninsport@rowingireland.ie

The following form is a final call for interested clubs to run a programme this Spring/ Summer 2023 and your programme will be advertised on the Rowing Ireland website and social media channels.