Confidence.

It might not be what’s in South Whidbey’s water, but it is certainly borne on the waters. It’s the ingredient that has fueled Jordan Tobler and Katie Saelens across the waters for Western Washington University’s national champion women’s crew.

The 2004 graduates of South Whidbey High School joined their Viking teammates in late May on New Jersey’s Mercer Lake to win the NCAA Division II Women’s Rowing Championship.

For 19-year-old Tobler, it was the second year in a row that she rowed in a shell during the races. In 2005, she was in the four with coxswain when WWU won its first championship since becoming a member of the NCAA. This year she was in the varsity eight.

Saelens, who turned 20 a few weeks after the championship, was in this year’s four-oared shell.

The two took different routes to the championship from South Whidbey High.

Saelens, the daughter of Mike and Leslie Saelens of Clinton, was cut from the high school tennis team as a sophomore.

“The coach didn’t think I had the athletic ability,” she recalled. So she continued to play tennis with her dad, rode her bicycle and woke up everyday looking to the west Admiralty Inlet.

Tobler, daughter of Lisa and Bill McDermott of Langley, was a member of the volleyball, basketball and track teams in high school. She experienced the thrill of state-level competition with her volleyball teammates. And she knew when she left home for the Bellingham school that she wanted to do crew.

“I knew I was going to try out,” Tobler said. She had seen a crew race and simply fell in love with the sport, though she “had no idea of what the commitment would be.”

Making the team

Saelens was talked into attending the initial crew meeting her freshman year. “I though it might be fun, being out on the water every morning rowing a boat.”

She saw Tobler in the audience, and she remembers a short conversation that was basically, hey, I’m turning out and you should, too.

So the next Monday morning both women appeared at the crew house at 5 a.m. Before they would sit in a shell and begin their rapid rise to national championships, the two had to work out and prove their physical fitness.

Tobler had kept fit in high school on varsity sports teams. Saelens had taken fitness classes. Neither thought they were out of shape, and, though it wasn’t easy, the initial fitness test was passed.

Both women had to run a timed mile, do 50 push ups, do 100 yards of leap frogs, then 75 crunches, the bear crawl for 100 yards and finish with another mile. The record time is around 18 or 19 minutes, and Saelens finished her first fitness test in 28 minutes.

Between the dream of being on the water and the physical nature of the sport, something sparked in both of the Whidbey Islanders.

“There was this sense of challenge,” Saelens said. “I had confidence in myself it was something

I could do. I really wanted to get out on the water.”

So Tobler and Saelens joined their Viking teammates, and within a few weeks were on the water. But baby steps came first.

Learning to row

“The first time I sat in the boat it was still on the dock,” Tobler remembers. “This is where you put your feet. This is the seat, it moves back and forth.”

The first time in the boat on the water, coaches would let only two row at a time, while the others learned balance and began to get the feel of the skinny shells.

“So many things go into rowing,” Saelens said. “You get in the boat and feel like you’re going to fall in. There’s nine people keeping balance.”

Rowers must also be careful where they step in the boat, or run the risk of stepping right through the skin. They learned to row together, to feather the blade of the oar, to listen to the coaching of their coxswain and coaches in nearby boats, to pull in unison so that the eight in their coxswain become one.

They would do this each day in the fall and winter, on the waters of Lake Whatcom or Lake Samish, way before daylight breaks, and by 5 a.m. each day they would row for an hour and 45 minutes before heading off to class.

“Your body is going through so much pain, just pushing yourself so hard,” Saelens said.

Then without hesitation, she continues, “You have to get through it, day by day. Competing with whatever other boat. You’ve got to stay ahead.”

Victories in local races meant more competition in the spring through to regionals and then the NCAA tournament. In 2005, Saelens took a road trip to watch Jordan, then a freshman, row to victory in the national championship in California.

WWU teammates told her that next year, she would be racing in the nationals.

Jordan remembers being a novice in that 2005 varsity boat.

“You don’t think you know a lot,” she says, “but I’m a strong athlete and I worked my (rear) off.”

Saelens, too, began working with the goal of being on the varsity winner’s stand in 2006.

“Every day I had this nagging, guilty feeling if I wasn’t working out,” Saelens recalled. So she ran and lifted, challenging herself every day.

And as both women became more powerful, muscles sculpted by hours of pulling on ergometers (rowing machines for the uninitiated), and doing cardio workouts, something else became evident to the two.

“This is all mental,” Tobler said. Putting in the hundreds of hours of painful work for 7 ½ minutes of competition makes others call the two “crazy.”

“My family knew I was working hard, but they didn’t really know how hard,” Saelens said.

On to the races

As regionals and nationals approached this past spring, Tobler was well ensconced in the varsity eight. She had started in the varsity boat as part of the bow pair in the number two seat (one through eight, bow to stern). Then she was moved to the six seat, in the middle of the boat’s “engine room.”

“I felt really strong in that seat. I was told it was tougher,” she said with a shrug. “I was comfortable.”

The stern pair, Tobler and Saelens explained, control the tempo of the boat. The middle four are the strongest, pulling the hardest. The bow pair are technical, first to take the stroke in the water and they must be on time.

For Saelens, the spring season saw her in the junior varsity eight, in the seven seat as part of the stroke pair. A little more than two weeks before regionals, the Vikings were still not settled on who would be rowing in the four with coxswain at nationals. Members of the junior varsity team were split into fours and raced against each other.

When the waters had calmed, Saelens was in the number three seat, part of the engine for the Vikings’ varsity four with cox.

At nationals, the varsity eight race is run last, and there are qualifying heats to make it to the finals. Saelens knew what to expect based on training and the coaching of Vikings head coach John Fuchs and novice coach Karla Landis.

“We had a lot of faith in our coxswain and our coach gave us so much confidence,” Saelens said. “She kept telling us we were different, better, stronger. I was nervous, but not worried.”

The four won their qualifying heat, the race proceeding as they expected. In the west, Western had led most races. They knew they’d be behind early at the nationals, but there was no panic. At the halfway point, they passed their competition, and easily qualified for the finals.

The final four

As they waited for the start of the final four with coxswain, Saelens remembered “being totally, completely focused. And scared. I had faith in my crew and myself. If we put out 100 percent, it would be OK.”

They had a great start, Saelens said. “Coach had found a weakness in our start and we fixed it.”

The first strokes in the 2000 meter race are strong, focusing on power for about 200 meters, racing at 40 strokes per minute. Already, the Vikings were ahead as they settled into the middle portion of the race at 32 strokes per minute.

At 500 meters, the women took a “power 15 for Karla,” their coach, not changing the rate of the strokes, but making them more powerful. Another power 15 at 1,000 meters found the Vikings up by a half boat length on their competition.

“We took it up half a beat to 32 ½,” Saelens said. “With 500 meters to go we had open water on the other boats.”

“During the race, you don’t look to the other crews, but you see them out of the corner of your eyes,” Saelens said. “You don’t want them to gain an inch.”

The last 250 meters, she said, were probably rowed at 35 to 37 strokes per minute. The competition didn’t gain an inch.

For Saelens, the team national championship was within reach if Tobler and her crewmates could match the efforts of the four with coxswain. It would be much closer.

“We waited seven minutes at the starting line,” Tobler recalled. “They’d say ‘seven minutes to start.’ Then ‘six minutes to start.’ Finally ‘one minute to start.’ Then “attention… row!’”

The first powerful 25 strokes out of the way, Western shifted to 32 strokes per minute for their race pace. “Though with the adrenalin, we found an extra gear and were probably going 33 or 34,” Tobler said.

Like the fours, the varsity eight took a power 10 at 500 meters, but in this race the Vikings were trailing South Region champion Barry University of South Florida by four seats.

“We were calm,” Tobler said. They had been behind in the qualifying race as well. “We were fine.”

At 1,000 meters, Western took another power 20 and were still behind Barry by four seats.

“Our coxswain was telling us stay calm. She went through the boat, called out each name and told us to pull for each other.”

With 500 meters to go, the Vikings took 10 power strokes and increased the stroke rate to 36, but they were still two seats down. Tobler smiled as she remembered that moment.

“The thing is they (Barry) didn’t move anymore. We knew we had them.”

Still trailing, but with the confidence of a winner, at 250 meters Western increased their stroke to 40 strokes per minute.

“We started taking seats and we walked right through them,” Tobler said. “Now we’re up to the danger zone; 45 strokes per minute. We are totally walking through them. With 100 meters to go our cox is sitting (opposite) their bow seat. Calm and confident.”

And, the national champions.

They’ll be back

Saelens and Tobler will spend the summer working out so they are as strong the first day of fall workouts as they were in May when they became national champions.

And they will work even harder next spring so they can grasp the championship again. They have this confidence and this love of rowing.

“I know what it takes,” Saelens said.

“Water has always brought me happiness, good memories. I’ve always appreciated living near the water,” Saelens said. “I won’t let a day go by that I’ll do less than what my abilities allow.”

“It’s such an awesome sport,” Tobler added. “It’s the hardest sport, it works every part of your body. But the mornings when you wake up and everything is frosted, and your fingers are stinging. The water is like glass and nothing has touched it yet. You’re all moving as one, all going as one. And then the sun comes up. It’s freaking beautiful.”

Leslie Tidball of Clinton is the Community Prosecutor for the city of Everett and previously was a deputy prosecutor in Island County. She was the editor of “Inside the Seahawks” and a former reporter.