Rowing caters for rowers, but not for spectators.
Rowing is complicated. The timetables are written in code. The crews look identical at a distance. The format changes from event to event. If you have no rowing background, you've got a small mountain to climb.
I'd been photographing regattas for about a decade. Every weekend, the same pattern: everyone at the river was there because they knew someone racing, or they were racing themselves. If you didn't have a personal connection, there wasn't much to keep you watching past the first crew you cared about.
Three things I won't budge on.
Community over leaderboard
The point isn't winning. The point is spotting your mate's name two rows above you, the WhatsApp group going off when someone backs a dud, the friendly heckling in your league. Everything else is in service of that.
Free, full stop
The core game is free. No paywalls on predictions, no buying advantage.. Premium subscriptions exist (they help keep the lights on) but they never touch scoring.
Built for the sport
The league becomes the spectacle, races become pivotal when they split the crowd and leaderboard come alive when results start flowing in.
Sport, data & product building
After learning to row at Loughborough University my rowing career took me to Notts County Rowing Association, London Rowing Club and then Tyne Amateur Rowing Club. During that time I fell in love with it and was very lucky to have picked up a couple of trinkets in that time.
Since graduating in Sports Technology many years ago I've enjoyed a career bridging media, marketing and technology with projects touching real-time data for live broadcasts, analytics tools for performance teams, marketing at the Boat Race and digital transformation projects.
Fantasy Rowing started as a side project over 10 years ago, that post-pandemic, I challenged myself to build as an app and that's where we are now. Every regatta brings a few more players, every player has multiple ways to connect with their friends in the game and every race brings drama to the leaderboard. That's the bit I love.
If you want to learn more, have got a feature idea, a bug to flag, or a strongly-held opinion about what the next event should be, I want to hear it.
Play this season.
Free to download. Free to play. The next regatta is always closer than you think.