City Man is Flowing with Love of Rowing:

John Duarte touting beginners’ program


Morgantown Dominion Post
12 July 2009           
By Stefanie Loh

With his father in the Portuguese navy, John Duarte, 50, has been around water his entire life.

“I’ve always been fascinated by things on the water,” said Duarte, president of the Monongahela Rowing Association. “How the water carries life. With the ocean, you’ve got this flatness, and then you come and start seeing the shoreline. I guess I’ve always enjoyed that.”

Morgantown is hundreds of miles from any ocean, so Duarte takes solace in the fact that the Monongahela River runs right through town. That allows him to continue rowing, a sport he picked up at age 16 in his native Portugal, but never seriously pursued until 2005, when he joined the MRA.

Now, Duarte wants to spread his love for the sport to everyone else in Morgantown.

“Rowing is not an elite sport,” Duarte said. “It started as a way of life, and it continues today because it’s an environmentally friendly sport. It’s dependent on pure
human power, and it’s nonpolluting in every way.”

Still, it’s never been a very high-profile sport in Morgantown, and Duarte wants to change that.

The first step, he said, is to try to change people’s mindset about the river. The Monongahela was once a bustling waterway, but river commerce has long since
disappeared and, in most people’s eyes, the Mon has now become just another component of the picturesque Morgantown landscape.

“The river is behind the trees and people cross it but usually don’t see it otherwise,” Duarte said. “On a day-to-day [basis], very few people have contact with the
river except for passing over on the two bridges. And then you get stuck in traffic, but you’re not really looking at the river.

“The funny thing is that we don’t have enough bridges to cross the river, so everybody is aggravated by having to cross it. So the river is seen more as an impediment to things in Morgantown than as a complement.”

Duarte has decided that the best way to help people develop an appreciation for the river is to get them on it.

As a result, he’s been working hard to tout the MRA’s “Learn to Row” program this summer.

The $250 fee for the program includes six two-hour lessons and the $150 MRA annual dues that allows members to take one of the club’s 12 boats on the water at any time.

Meg Ayers, a Learn to Row instructor, said the program is a crash course in rowing and that by the end, most people have a pretty good idea of whether they enjoy the sport enough to want to continue.

“We’re trying to teach the basics in a really small amount of time,” Ayers said. “Six lessons is really tight because some of [these] things take longer than two hours to figure out.”

Ayers is also available for private lessons if people want to continue rowing at the end of the class.

The MRA is headquartered at a boathouse on 40 Donley St. that it shares with the WVU women’s crew team.

Until a year ago, the MRA operated out of a boathouse on the former General Woodworking site in Westover, which Duarte said was much harder to get to than the present location.

The new boathouse is right off the rail trail, directly under the former Boathouse Bistro restaurant on the waterfront.

Duarte hopes that the boathouse’s location will help entice frequent rail trail users to give rowing a try. As a low-impact sport, Duarte said, rowing is easy on the knees and is especially good for runners who are looking to cross train in a second sport.

“Activities connect and bring people around,” Duarte said. “The trail has done that and [we’re hoping] this new boathouse will do that.”