This letter is to notify you of the immediate challenges facing the Trojan Navy so that you may render your support.


Head Coach Gene Kininmonth

As most of you are aware, for the past four years the USC Men’s Crew has rowed out of Loyola Marymount University’s boathouse in Marina del Rey. This proved to be an excellent home for our fleet and the Trojans flourished there. Unfortunately, LMU has decided not to renew our lease agreement for next season.

Without a boathouse, we have moved our equipment to the USC Women’s Boathouse in the Port of Los Angeles. We are guests of the women’s coaches at this facility, which is filled to capacity with the women’s shells. With no alternative, we are forced to keep our shells and oars outside on the boat trailer and in slings. While it is exciting to be back in the Port, the spiritual home of the Crew for almost half a century, we have invested heavily in our equipment over the past four years and it is distressing to see it now exposed to the outdoor elements like this.

Plans to construct a new boathouse large enough to accommodate both teams on this site are in preliminary stages and with strong support from the Athletic Department, I am very confident we will see ground breaking in the next two years. In the meantime, we need to face immediate issues before our crew can begin rowing in the coming fall.

To protect our equipment we must purchase an adequate shelter and temporary racks. Furthermore, to operate in harmony with the women’s program, a second dock must be installed to accommodate the needs of both teams. This is a serious logistical issue as the current dock is only long enough to launch two crews at a time and we cannot begin our fall season until a second dock has been installed. In the mornings, our practices concludes at the same time that the women’s team begins theirs and with only one dock it would take up to forty minutes by the time they launch and we dock. Furthermore, the current dock has room for only one of our coach boats to be tied up. We cannot operate both a freshman and varsity team with only one launch.

We have calculated our financial need to purchase the necessary shelter, racks and dock to be close to $50,000 and it is imperative that we raise these funds in the next few weeks in order to have everything in place by the fall semester. I cannot begin to express how much a late start will devastate our ability to recruit a freshman team in the fall, which will in turn hurt our progress for the next several years.

Please support us now so that we may continue the work so many of you have sponsored so generously since the program was restarted in 1999. Your tax-deductible gifts should be made payable to “USC Men’s Crew” or “University of Southern California” today so that we can continue the rapid progress of the past several years. Mail your gift to:

Attn: Gene Kininmonth
USC Men’s Crew
1026 W. 34th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2500

For more information about how you can make a gift to the University please visit the SUPPORTING THE CREW section on this website.

Fight On!
Gene Kininmonth
Head Coach
http://trojannavy.com/coaches.html