Situated on the other side of Chiswick Bridge in leafy Chiswick, Tideway Scullers School (TSS) is a young (in rowing terms at least) club with an extremely strong and lengthy record of producing excellent scullers and rowers at both country and club level.
Founded in 1957 by legendary sculling coach Alec Hodges, the club is committed to expanding access at the junior level to state school Londoners, with beginners starting at J13 and J14. Rowers are coached on the women’s side by Rhona MacCallum, who also serves as the new overall Director of Rowing, and former Kew House School Boat Club coach Rufus Tilt on the junior side.
TSS’s junior programme has often been the envy of clubs up and down the country, producing quality athletes year after year who have won Henley honours in the Fawley and Diamond Jubilee Challenge Cups in the last few seasons, with crews rarely failing to reach the weekend.
At the base level and across the entire club, Tideway is committed to accommodating all abilities and aspirations.
As Director of Rowing, Rhona MacCallum said in an interview for JRN: “For some people a win is qualifying a boat to race at the Henley course. For some people, it’s a top 20 at Head of the River Race. For some, it’s winning a head race.
“You don’t have to be fast to come here. You have to have the potential, the attitude, and the will to get fast and we will help you do it”.
This philosophy is mirrored with a continued commitment to helping top-performing athletes in the form of extra sessions and extra coaching, meaning that both ends of the performance spectrum are catered for. On the senior side, the club has undergone somewhat of a rebuild post-covid, with 2025 marking the first time the club had qualified a boat for all club events at Henley in several seasons. The senior women have also expanded to field an eight, which would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago.
MacCallum, excited about the growth of the women’s side, said: “We are the only place where women can be coached by professional female coaches at the moment in the UK. It’s pitiful how few women are in coaching. We’ve got female coaches with international experience as our director of rowing and our lead senior coach.”
The ability to field crews to compete at the very top of rowing and sculling, and not simply in juniors, is a fact the club maintains through a balanced coaching approach of Anna Bud De Long in the senior squads, with personalised tiered training available to those who require it.
In recent years, somewhat ironically given its name, the club’s entries in elite-level sculling events have suffered, a fact which TSS is looking to ameliorate by creating a high-performance men’s and woman’s sculling squad that will see the club return to the very top of the podium. The rebuild of the last few years looks like it has the potential to push TSS into the rowing pantheon once again.
