Tom Matlack ’86 P’16 has never felt as in the zone as he did while rowing at Wesleyan.
“There’s something about being in a boat on the Connecticut River that, for me, was very deeply spiritual,” Matlack said. “It's a feeling that is truly unique.”
Matlack walked onto the men’s rowing team with his freshman year roommate, and the decision turned out to change the course of his college years and make them lifelong friends.
“It's this weird thing where you're with eight other people, and you're trying to move in exact synchronicity,” Matlack explained. “There's a feeling when you're doing that well that the boat actually feels almost like it's floating. And that there's no way to tell who is contributing what to the speed of the boat. So, you have to trust that each of the other people who are rowing with you is working just as hard as you are.”
This sense of trust built an intense emotional bond between Matlack and his teammates, many of whom he still speaks with on a regular basis today.
“Both in training, but then even more so in a race at the critical moments in a competition, you have to believe that your boat mates are going to respond with courage at the moment when courage is required,” Matlack said.
Matlack, who majored in the College of Social Studies, enjoyed rowing since he joined the team, but the arrival of Coach Will Scoggins in 1985 transformed his relationship to both the sport and Wesleyan’s team. Scoggins brought a passion to rowing that the Cardinals needed to succeed, and the two seasons he worked at Wesleyan were the most successful in the 50+ years of the team’s history.
“[Scoggins] liked to say that rowing was just the medium and that he actually was, in a way, an artist and almost like he was teaching us something far deeper than rowing, in terms of radically changing ourselves, the way we thought of ourselves,” Matlack said.
He recalls an analogy that Scoggins used to motivate the team: an acorn doesn’t become a big seed. Rather, it must transform itself to become an oak tree.
“That's what he was asking us to do, to completely transform ourselves, in terms of our physical conditioning, but also our mental and emotional and spiritual conditioning and to learn how to work hard at a level that we'd never even thought was imaginable before he came,” Matlack said.
In fact, the Cardinals went from having little success on the water to winning every meet in which they participated under Coach Scoggins, going 8-0 in 1985-86 and 7-0 in 1986-87 for a perfect 15-0 record in that two-year span. That still holds to present day as the longest unbeaten run in the program’s 50+ year history.
Encapsulating the winning run, during Matlack’s senior season, the Cardinals’ varsity heavy eights won the New England title, edging past the University of New Hampshire by just 0.7 seconds. Advancing to the national title meet the following week known as the Dad Vails at the time, Wesleyan took second place, losing only to five-time champion Temple by less than two lengths. In an interview with the Argus following the competition, Coach Scoggins said, “Second in the nation, I’d call that unbelievable.”
For Matlack and many of his teammates, Scoggins became a lifelong mentor and friend. This past year, Matlack and teammates John Gannon ’86 P’25 and Peter Sallick ‘87 came up with the idea to establish and grow an endowment fund that, once fully vested, will generate income so that there will be a Scoggins eight purchased every four to five years. The dedication ceremony took place in October, and every single member of the team from those years with Scoggins showed up to recognize him. A full gallery of the dedication can be seen here.
“We raised enough money so that there would always be, in perpetuity, a shell in the boathouse with his name on it,” Matlack said. “So every rower, forever, will know his name. We got the first of those boats. And we christened it with his name on it at Wesleyan….All of those guys would say exactly the same thing that I'm saying, which is that he is the most important mentor in their life.”
The skills Matlack gained while rowing have proved useful in many areas of his adult life. He used to work in finance and would channel his inner rower while working in high-stress situations trying to close big deals.
“I had a certain calm at the moment of highest tension that no one else had, and it was a huge advantage,” Matlack said. “Will taught us so that when we were at the starting line of the national championships, everyone else was flipping out, scared, and we were not scared. We were relaxed, we were ready.”
Matlack now works trying to help people get sober, a job which requires much of the same rowing mindset about navigating tough situations.
Rowing has also become a popular subject in Matlack’s writing. He’s written extensively about the subject and even published an article about the first race the team ever rowed with Scoggins in a 2007 issue of The Wesleyan Magazine.
“I've always really enjoyed writing; I think in some ways it distills the experience down,” Matlack said. “[That race] was against the Coast Guard, which we had lost to for 17 years in a row and never had beaten. At the halfway mark, we were actually down and we had to find a way to catch up. And once we did, it was a very emotional race. So I hope I was able to capture the intensity of it. I think writing about it helped me really distill what was so powerful about it.”
Surprisingly, rowing also influences Matlack’s parenting. With little encouragement from Matlack, his son began rowing in early high school of his own accord and eventually joined the national team before getting recruited to row for Brown University this coming fall. In a truly full circle manner, Matlack’s son will be rowing under a coach whom Scoggins himself recruited to Brown before coaching Matlack at Wesleyan 35 years ago.
“I have to be very, very careful not to let on how much it means to me because I don't ever want him to feel like I'm putting any pressure on him,” Matlack said of his son. “I very rarely will give him direct advice. I try to just be supportive, like when he's going into big races and stuff. [I want] to be supportive and be someone who he can talk to because he knows that I understand what he's going through. So that's a really cool bond.”
In a way that he perhaps never imagined when he walked onto the team with his roommate all those years ago, rowing remains an integral part of Matlack’s life.
“I think it's a common vocabulary for life that we share with thinking about ourselves, thinking about what's important, thinking about how to face difficult challenges, whether it's professional or personal,” Matlack said. “What we accomplished with Will in boats is translatable to every situation I've been in during my life and the 35 years since [Wesleyan]. So I carry it with me wherever I go.”
What Other Alums are Saying about Coach Scoggins' impact in their time at Wesleyan:
Clarence Williams ’89, P’23
When I think about the impact Will had on me personally, one word comes to mind: transformative. He helped bring out what was inside or what we didn’t think was possible. I recall him saying many times that it was “gut check time.” One of my favorite books by Ryan Holiday entitled "The Obstacle is the Way", talks about how when challenges are viewed as opportunities, transformative growth is possible and great things can be achieved. That’s Will!
Karen Humphries Sallick '87, coxswain
I will always be grateful to Will for teaching me how to be curious and learn what motivates a person so that I could inspire them to deliver their best. He taught me to do the same for myself without fear. He helped me hone that skill over the ’86 and ’87 seasons. I continue to lean on Will’s lessons every day in my personal and work life.
Paul Buckovich '87
Among the often seemingly basic but usually deeply penetrating guidance from Will was a communication comprised of two simple words – “no regrets”. On the face of it, cross the finish line without second-guessing a single stroke effort and without questioning a single moment of focus during race. But it was not really about the race. It was about character, commitment, and the love and respect you showed yourself and earned from your teammates and coaches during the season, and the off-season, before the race commenced. From another messenger, “no regrets” might be intended or heard as “no mistakes” or “fear failure”, but with Will, it was never that simple and for that I am forever grateful.
Bill Tokheim '89
As someone who was not much of a high school athlete, trying out for frosh crew seemed like a minor decision, but it became what I would learn to understand as a peak Wesleyan experience. Coach Will Scoggins led us as we confronted stress, friendship, doubts, and competition. Will’s coaching, like my best professors, offered paths for us to construct meaning and self-knowledge from the experience.
Will, along with Jaime Tome my novice coach, helped me experience what excellence and commitment feels like as a team. I learned how to strive for the highest level of excellence and, crucially, to locate joy and fun in that endeavor.
Jaime Tomé '85, assistant coach for 1985-86 men's crew team
“Be the oarsman that you want to row with!” So sublimely fundamental it should have seemed obvious, but it is a goal I had never been charged with before, and to this day I have not heard similar words from anybody but Will. And as with all of Will’s lessons, it could be extended to all aspects of life: “Be the physician that you would want to treat you. Be the spouse that you would want to marry. Be the parent you would wish to have raised you.“
Alex Fowler '87
“Will brought clear and definite knowledge about how to make boats go fast, and a big part of that was about discipline, sacrifice and commitment; but another part, that I feel sometimes gets overlooked, is the joy he brought with him. You can see it in some of the pictures. His eyes sparkle with a deep happiness when he sees excellence in his team – excellence that he encouraged on and off the water. The joy Will brought and shared with us, made working hard and rowing fun, and that helped our boats get fast.”
David Lilly '89
What Will asked our group to learn is that rowing is based upon trust, and trust upon confidence in one another’s integrity. The medium of rowing provided a very real and tangible means of learning over and over, stroke after stroke, practice after practice, race after race, how to strive to be worthy of your teammates’ trust. It offered a palpable validation of people going beyond themselves to keep faith with each other.
Bradley Lubin '87, P'20, P'23
If Will Scoggins had just been an amazing coach for Wesleyan crew between the years 1985 and 1987 it would be inconceivable that his forty rowers could establish an endowed scholarship in his honor. Will was more a philosopher than coach. Our success as a crew was completely dependent on his main philosophies of focusing on the moment at hand, respecting each other completely and lastly having us evolve from who we were to who we wanted to be. My favorite theme was his analogy of a seed choosing to either become a big seed or an oak tree. Learning to become the oak tree was the most profound lesson taught by him.
Christopher Swain '90
Will challenged us to abandon ourselves to the effort of rowing: to pull as hard as we could on every single stroke of a race, to give everything we had, again and again and again. This was and is an extremely taxing physiological proposition. It starts out hard, and then it becomes more and more painful as your heart rate, oxygen debt, and lactate levels rise. Will’s brilliance was in giving us the perfect “why.” He told us to row, not for ourselves, but for one another. He knew that we loved our teammates and that there was nothing we wouldn’t do, no pain we wouldn’t bear, no darkness we couldn’t find our way through for each other. Under his gaze, we were able to fill our hearts, and to empty ourselves. He showed us a fierce kind of love, and it set us free.
Peter Sallick '87
“The legend of Will may be that we all got into line and followed him every day. That was the case most of the time, but an incident that has always stuck with me was a day when I was exhausted and frustrated and just didn’t want to do the work - which was more jumpies AFTER we had been rowing for hours. I got out of line, but rather than punish me, Will got in there and did the jumpies with me. I was embarrassed. I was annoyed. And, I also got them done. You can imagine how the kind of personal leadership Will showed me and the rest of the team that day would influence my leadership choices over time.”
John Gannon '86, P'25
Establishing this endowment is an idea that came to me in the midst of the pandemic, when we had so much time to think and to reflect. The lessons I learned from Will have guided how I've lived my life. I knew the same was true for all of us, and so I thought long and hard about how we might honor that in a tangible way. We'd purchased and named a boat for Will in the mid '90s, but I was in search of something that would be timeless, and so I proposed to the folks at Wesleyan that we establish an endowment to ensure that forever more there would be a shell in the Wesleyan boathouse with Will's name on it ("Hands on the Scoggins" would ring out in perpetuity).
In doing so, I also hoped that we might inspire other groups of alumni to similarly honor professors and coaches who were meaningful to them. As you’ll recall, we were all committed to including today’s crew at the dedication – so they could see and hear from the man whose name would be on a shell in which they’d be competing. I also wanted them to be there because philanthropy is learned behavior and I wanted them to witness firsthand what we were doing and why we were doing it. My hope is that perhaps one day they’ll do the same honoring Coach Carney.
From my perspective, there are really two endowments - the one that funds the shell and the unspoken endowment of Will's legacy, which is evidenced by how we are all living our lives. The former is tangible, though perhaps the latter is as or more important. Just like an endowment, what Will instilled within us is a gift that keeps on giving. When I think about the choices I've made and how I try to go about living my life, it often comes back to lessons I learned from Will. I can see in my son and how he's living his life that some of the DNA I "inherited" from Will has been passed to him. I will forever be grateful to Will and to our entire crew for the bonds of commitment, love, trust, and friendship we forged on and off the Connecticut thanks to Will and WesCrew.
John Wiseman '86
We were much more fortunate than we knew. Will entered our lives on that sunny Labor Day espousing concepts that seemed so foreign to Wesleyan rowing at the time since he was the fourth crew coach I had. Total commitment, total honesty, focus on the moment. We had no idea that the impact would be far greater than just making boats go fast. Faith was a huge factor because it was months of sweat before we ever experienced results. That was a major part of the message. Results were not the only measure, it was the process, the commitment. It was “a different kind of fun.” Hearing from so many former teammates how much Will’s lessons had been imprinted on their souls was inspiring. Most impressive was the fact that it did not matter whether the person was in the first boat or the last. The impact was universal and positive. The lessons and skills that began that day have been a part of my life ever since and I am eternally grateful. Much of who I am and what I have accomplished started on those steps. I sometimes regret that more people did not get to experience all the Will brought.
Credits:
Annabelle Miller '25