A Shell Game

Bill Tytus, president of Pocock Racing Shells in Everett, has led the company into becoming one of the top suppliers of racing shells in the country.

The first time he visited the crew boathouseat Syracuse University in 1992, John Tytus says he noticed something odd about the facilities. “The men had a full locker room upstairs that was spacious and pretty nice,” says Tytus, 35, who rowed on the Orange crew from 1992 to 1996 and now directs sales for Pocock Racing Shells in Everett. But wedged downstairs in a corner of the boathouse, the Syracuse women’s crew changed clothes in a room that Tytus says was “about as big as a clothes closet.”

Syracuse’s locker room arrangements were the norm for college crews in the early ’90s, when competitive college rowing was dominated by lanky guys like the six-foot, four-and-a-half-inch Tytus and women were an afterthought. In 1997, that changed. That was the year the NCAA belatedly recognized Title IX of the Federal Education Amendment, originally passed in 1972, and began sponsoring national championship racing for women rowers. The NCAA’s decision started a tide of cash flowing into college rowing programs for women.

At Syracuse, the women got a spacious new locker room of their own, and other college athletic departments at schools like Michigan, Ohio State and the University of Virginia that had been allocating millions to male-dominated sports like football and basketball—and not much to women’s athletics—suddenly became gender sensitive. Washington State University, for example, elevated its women’s crew—but not the men—to a varsity sport, making the team eligible for scholarships and financial support from the school’s athletic department. Clemson’s women’s crew now rows out of what Tytus describes as “a Taj Mahal” of a boathouse.

“The guys,” he says, “still row out of a shed.”

On the floor of Pocock Racing Shells' factory, employee John Boyer preps a hull for a second layup.

For Pocock, the NCAA’s decision to support Title IX was a lifesaver. George Pocock began building sleek wooden racing boats for the University of Washington in 1911 in an unlighted former tearoom on Lake Union, and for decades afterward, the family-owned company dominated the business of making college racing shells in the United States. Pocock boats, hand-crafted like fine furniture, brought back Olympic gold for Seattle rowers and national rowing titles for the UW. But by 1985, when Bill Tytus, John’s dad, bought the company from Seattle rowing icon Stan Pocock,

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