As Lauri Kauffman of Gladwyne, one of the team members, said at a sponsors' dinner Friday night, without the $30,000 that the L'Oreal company contributed to the team this year, Kauffman wouldn't have been on this team. She couldn't have afforded to pay her own way to represent her country.
The story of how the money was raised, and why, is a story of so many amateur sports organizations. USRowing, the national governing body, gives most of its money - money raised from sponsors and received from the United States Olympic Committee - to the men's and women's elite coaches and training camps.
But money for development? There hardly ever seemed to be any.
Two years ago, Gil Roehrs of Berwyn had a daughter who rowed at the Agnes Irwin School. She made the U.S. junior national women's team. She paid her own way to competitions. And Roehrs saw how other talented girls chose not to try out for the team and how the constant scrambling for money became the focus of rowers every summer instead of training.
Not surprisingly, the U.S. national team that Roehrs followed so closely did terribly, and Roehrs' daughter went on to row in college. There was no reason for Roehrs to pay any more attention to the juniors, except that, as he says, ``the bad experience stuck with me.''
Roehrs knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody at L'Oreal. After many phone calls and much persuasion, L'Oreal contributed $30,000 and became a sponsor. And Peter Giller, whose daughter Michelle is on this year's team, did some fund-raising among his corporate buddies, and so energy companies like CMS Energy, Coastal Corp., ABB Energy Venture Inc., and Panhandle Corp. added $25,000 to the women's fund.
