Rent-a-rowers battle through the blizzard
Alese Garstick shovels snow as fellow teammate Hanna Jones applies salt to the sidewalks. Members of the rowing team shovel snow everyday starting at 5:00 am.
Feb 7, 2011
As the snowpocalypse dumped it’s snow down on Allendale Wednesday, most Grand Valley State University students were celebrating the snow day by hiding beneath extra blankets. But at 5 a.m., seven members of the university’s rowing team were wide-eyed with shovels in hand, fighting to clear the 16 inches of snow that smothered the Allendale Campus.
“The sidewalks – we couldn’t even see them,” said Robert DeWeerd, junior rower and leader of the shoveling team that morning. “We had to dig holes to find them.”
The rowers are part of the Rent-A-Rower program, which allows GVSU to hire members of the rowing club in order to help them pay their club dues.
“These are true student athletes with a strong work ethic,” said GVSU head rowing coach John Bancheri. “I’m not surprised that I’ve received calls saying they did an excellent job, given the situation.”
Mornings after snowfall, the Rent-A-Rowers are scheduled to shovel between 5 and 8 a.m., and usually manage to clear up their allotted segments of campus in about two-and-a-half hours, but the blizzard saw them working their entire scheduled three hours and only managing to clear the south side of the GVSU campus.
The rowers usually transport their equipment with motorized vehicles slightly larger than golf-carts, but “waist-high” drifts forced them to traverse a long distance on foot, wasting much of their time, DeWeerd said.
Ken Stanton, grounds supervisor at GVSU, said that snow removal after the storm was difficult because of the unusually high volume that had fallen the night before.
“I’ve been here 14 winters and I’ve never seen an 18-inch snowstorm,” Stanton said. “We had a 15-inch snowstorm back in the December of 2000. What makes it more difficult is the amount of snow and the time it takes to clean it up.”
The rowers were relieved by student employees at 8 a.m. Stanton said extra student workers were called in throughout the day, and it took until Wednesday evening to return the grounds to “functional” order. Grounds employees were still removing snow in some areas of the school on Friday.
