Coach Bob Hillen was at the height of his game

December 15, 2006

In Part III of this three-part website series Trojan Coach Gene Kininmonth pays remembrance to USC’s long-time rowing coach.

When USC raced UC Berkeley and UCLA in 1956 the race was so close at the finish post that no one in either the Trojan or Golden Bears shell knew who had won.

Official records obtained from USC Archives reveal Trojan Oarsman Stu Neffeler’s (class of ’58) account of the race:

“After we stopped rowing no one knew the outcome, it was too close. None of us could speak for a few minutes, but I did notice something that told me we had won.

“Hillen and Ebright [Cal’s Coach] followed the race together in a launch. It was afternoon and they were backlit by the sun so all I could see were silhouettes. Hillen wore a baseball hat and Ebright wore something like a fedora and when one tossed the baseball hat in the air and the other pulled down the brim of the fedora I knew we had won.”


USC Men's Rowing Coach Bob Hillen.

Coach Hillen’s Trojans had for the first and only time ever knocked off the giant in both Olympic and collegiate rowing, and in doing so had also beaten Ky Ebright, the most decorated rowing coach in US history. Ebright’s eight-man crews from Cal had won gold for the United States in three of the five previous Olympics.

In beating UCLA, the Trojans continued an unbroken string of victories over the Bruins that had begun in 1953 and would continue until 1961.

Later that same year, one of Hillen’s Trojan Oarsmen, Conn Findlay, would go on to win gold at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne.

Bob Hillen was certainly at the height of his game. He would go on to assist in coaching at future Olympic and Pan American Games, but the year 1956 offered indisputable proof that he could take a program from nothing and raise it to the highest echelons of sport.


Coach Hillen accepts an award in honoring USC Men's Crew.

To understand how far Coach Hillen had brought the Trojan Crew one must know the story of how the program was born. Until today, this story has been known by only a handful of men.

In 1948 Julian Wolf, a former UCLA oarsman, was studying law at USC when he decided to start a rowing team for the student body. He enlisted the help of UCLA assistant coach Bob Hillen to provide shells and oars from UCLA for the new Trojan Crew. This much is common knowledge.

But there is more to the story that had never before been revealed by Mr. Wolf until earlier this year at a ceremony to scatter the ashes of the late Coach Hillen and his wife at sea. The service took place on the boat of former oarsman Don Sloper in the presence of son Peter Hillen and former oarsmen Jack Schumacher, Bill Gobbell, James Hoffman, Conn Findlay, and Stu Neffeler. As current coach of the Crew I was also honored to be present.

What few people knew was that at that time UCLA Athletic Department officials, citing the cost of running a program that had no local competition, had just shut down the UCLA Crew. When he was instructed to lock up the facility Bob Hillen was living in the boathouse, unbeknownst to the UCLA administration.

With his passion for the sport, Coach Hillen responded to Mr. Wolf’s call for assistance and welcomed the freshly formed Trojan squad into the UCLA boathouse. The inaugural USC Crew took to the waters of Ballona Creek in UCLA boats and oars but without the distraction of UCLA rowers.

It is an amazing story of irony in which UCLA athletic officials, having determined they could not afford to finance their own rowing program, were actually floating a successful program for their cross-town rivals from Troy.

When USC crews began showing up at regattas, UCLA administrators finally buckled under pressure from former Bruin rowers to ‘reopen’ the boathouse to UCLA students a year later. By then Coach Hillen had taken over the reigns of the Trojan Navy and moved the USC rowing program south to the Port of Los Angeles, where the Crew enjoyed superior rowing conditions with new shells donated by UC Berkeley and oars left over from the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics.


Coach Hillen christens a shell bearing his own name at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

Coach Hillen grew the program into a powerhouse. The 1950s were certainly the Golden Era for USC Crew and 1956 proved the pinnacle for both the program and its coach.

Crew Remembers '56 - Part 1 | Crew Remembers '56 - Part 2