As a high school athlete rowing in Orlando Florida, I was incredibly frustrated by the lack of technology used by our club. I saw so many parent volunteers involved doing admin work to keep our team rowing that could easily be automated. There was so much wasted time that could be better spent improving the organization instead of just keeping it afloat. My senior year I decided that it was time to find a solution to this problem. In 2011 I founded RowerForms.com, a platform for crew teams to keep track of paperwork, see who is coming to practice, and collect dues via PayPal. I saw this platform as a way to help rowing clubs automate more of the day-to-day tasks to free up volunteers and coaches to spend more time improving the organization and helping athletes spend more time on the water.
12 years later, RowerForms has evolved into Boathouse Connect, a platform that does much more than the basic features of RowerForms. The mission of Boathouse Connect is to combine, or "Connect" all the services that a rowing club needs and uses into a single platform. In the last 12 years, I have been a high school rower, masters rower, coach, and board member for multiple rowing clubs throughout the country. Every club operates differently, but they all have some core characteristics (collecting dues, fundraising, maintaining equipment, sending communications, etc). I have built Boathouse Connect with these core characteristics in mind to make the platform adaptable to nearly every rowing club.
The world of rowing is continually evolving, and with it so must our platform. With more and more clubs embracing new ways of doing things, we must continually adapt our platform to the ever-changing needs of our customers and partners. In the last 2 years, Boathouse Connect has welcomed 5 new members to our support and engineering teams so we can continue to deliver new and exciting features as well as help more rowing clubs improve their day-to-day operations.
- Michael Merwin
Founder of Boathouse Connect
Boathouse Connect