University of San Diego
NCAA DI • WCC
Date: December 7, 2025
Would Recommend
This isn’t coming from a place of me being upset about not being on a boat or something, I was on the eight with the former coach and Bart afterwards. I can’t speak to how he is now, but I can around the time he started, and I think this is relevant now considering he’s on leave. The people who were on the team around Covid were kind of rough around the edges, the former coach recruited people who had 1 thing missing in their recruitment to get into another school, but that he thought would make the program much faster than it had been. I think he realized he had his hands full since the school wasn’t supporting his vision properly, and unfortunately we ended up with Bart after two years of him being around. Bart came in and completely nuked the team, and kind of tried to stick it to these guys who were already there with a culture that couldn’t have been any more different than before. He was more interested in being some weird therapist instead of getting results. By the time I was done we barely had enough people to field an 8 for western sprints because people just kept quitting. Rowing in college is tough, but I’ve never seen a retention rate as bad as Barts. He’s basically Ted Lasso if he was ultra religious and dismissive of mental and physical health concerns. He genuinely has no concept of what good rowing is supposed to look like, because he never was a good rower. Almost every person on the team had more collective rowing experience than he ever had, and it really showed. I remember sitting with him and explaining rowing concepts to him when he first started because nobody had ever told him what they were. Anyways, I’ve had plenty of great rowing coaches before and after USD, but he definitely stuck out as the worst I’ve had by far. I really hope him being on leave ends up with him getting fired, it’s genuinely incredible that he is still there. I think it’s because they celebrate winning these Mickey Mouse events at head of the Charles and stuff like that, the school doesn’t know that they’re competing against mid tier D3 schools.