I have said that the coach will spend most of the time on technique and training. When we come to setting up the boat the coach will spend most of his time dealing with pitch. One of the reasons for this is that pitch is the least understood aspect of rowing. With modern equipment it is also the least significant but you would not think so when you see the amount of time spent dealing with pitch issues.

If you ask most coaches, "why they want pitch?" they do not know. What they know is that they want some and how much varies from place to place

Originally oars were made of wood and the spoon was symmetrical. That means if you drew a line along the centre of the shaft onto the spoon the centre of pressure was in the centre of the spoon. The swivel was made of brass and the button was of leather. The spoon was long and thin and all these factors meant it was easy for the spoon to turn in the water. The hands are on the top of the handle and as you pull the handle towards you the spoon will always tend to turn the same way, which would send the spoon diving.

By angling the spoon so that it would tend to come out of the water would counteract this problem. The question was by how much should the spoon be angled. If you could pull the oar horizontally, this would avoid the problem all together. This is not possible because the oar enters the water at about 11 degrees and the handle is about 50cms above the spoon. Also the force applied to the handle is not horizontal as the hands are lower than the shoulder.

To square off the forces, and produce a parallelogram, the vertical angle of the spoon, (pitch), should be the same as the angle formed when drawing a horizontal line from the shoulder and the angle down to the hands. In the early days, scullers would be rigged very low getting as close as possible to a horizontal draw by finishing just above their hips. But the draw was very inefficient because you cannot get your body weight behind the hands when finishing so low. So the rigging started to come up but so did the angle of the spoon. A pitch angle of 12 degrees was quite common but although the spoon was stable in the water, the greater the pitch the more inefficient the spoon.