M. Lightweight Crew Prepared for season's Close

Since September, the Harvard Varsity Lightweight (HVL) Crew has trained for nearly 540 hours. So far, that work has led to positive results in just over 18 minutes of racing.

This year's varsity eight contains a healthy mix of sophomores, juniors, and seniors: (bow to stern) sophomore Noah Bloom, Co-Captain Dave Weiss, sophomore Tobias Wehrli, senior James Lenhart, junior Gus Maclaurin, sophomore Jesse Elzinaga, Co-Captain Tom Fallows and sophomore Richie McCormack in the stroke seat. Junior Sujit Raman wears the headset in the coxswain seat.

The First Varsity (IV) boat is coached by Charlie Butt, now in his twelfth year with the program. Butt, who himself is a former US national team rower, has coached Harvard crews to five National Championships.

In lightweight rowing, the National Championship is earned by winning the Intercollegiate Rowing Association (IRA) National Championships in late May, although the Ivy League's Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges (EARC) Championships, held the prior weekend, is often regarded as the second element required for the national championship.

This year's IV has performed well, winning the first three races of its brief six-race season. On April 3, they drove past Cornell and Penn at the Matthews Cup, held in Philadelphia on the Schuylkill River. One week later they beat Dartmouth and MIT decisively in the Biglin Bowl, which took place on he home course. The next day, they journeyed to Princeton for a showdown with Rutgers, where again they prevailed by over eight seconds on the 2000-meter course.

Happily, the entire program has enjoyed success, as the second varsity, led by juniors Aric Christal, Don Casey, and Scott McCray, has also won its three races.

However, as any Harvard oarsman will remind you, the real test comes annually on this week, when Harvard, Yale, and Princeton do battle at the highly contested Goldthwait Cup. The HYPs, for short, are often a prelude to the EARC Sprints Championship and the national championship. In some years, the crew that has won at HYPs has gone on to be Eastern and national champions.

"This happens every year; the toughest competition comes at HYPs," Weiss said.

Last year's varsity eight, of which Weiss, Lenhart, Maclaurin, and Fallows were all part of, lost to both opponents at HYPs, and went on to finish second at Easterns and third at nationals.

"I think we're all haunted by that last race. We tried a number of different innovations, but, in the net, did not execute properly," Weiss said.

Actually, in the past decade, the HVL. program has followed a striking even-odd year pattern of results, winning in the odd years and falling short in the even years. As far back as 1993, the varsity boat won the national championship. Yet, in 1994, with six returning seniors who were all national champions from the year before, the crew was unable to pull everything together, coming up short in both end-of-the-season races.

True to this seemingly pre-destined rate, the 1995 varsity regrouped after a defeat at HYPS and won both Easterns and nationals. The pattern continued for the 1996 crew, who lost to Princeton at nationals by the smallest margin in recent memory. Race officials actually spent 10 minutes reviewing video the determine who won. In the end they said that Princeton has prevailed by the length of the rubber bow ball at the end of the boat--about two inches. And that tiny difference sent one team into greatest elation and the other into the depths of despair. 1997 captain Ryan Wise carried a bow ball around with him, signifying the margin after 2,000 meters, to guide him through the next year of training.

Tim Cullen '96, who is currently the freshman lightweight coach, also participated in that fateful race. For Cullen and his senior teammates, even the national championship from the year before could not shake the demons. Cullen cites that one race as the major motivator in his decision to train for the national team. He has spent the last three years pursuing that dream while trying to forget the Princeton loss.

Of course in 1997, after the drama of the previous year, the varsity boat won both EARC and IRA victories, and then, still following this odd even curse, the 1998 crew fell to their old nemesis, Princeton, at nationals. Last year was Maclaurin's and Weiss' first year on the varsity boat, so unlike Fallows and Lenhart, they have not won a national championship.

If we were to simply abide by the patterns of history, given that this is 1999, an odd year in the vicious cycle of victory and defeat, then the Crimson may be predetermined to win the national championship. But these athletes quickly disregard any superstitious prophesies, and are aware that a national championship is hardly a given.

"That streak does not really factor into our mentality. If anything, fixating on the streak hurts us," Fallows said. "This is a focus on irrelevant themes, when our real focus is a day-in-day out concentration on the practical elements of rowing."

"This streak is a nice conversation piece for spectators, but not for the athletes. Our advantage is that we think and we generate coordinated effort, and that is what makes boats move," he added.

Given their perspective on the past, and on the three races that await the varsity crew, the individuals on the boat are certainly prepared for the challenge:

Machlaurin and Lenhart attended the pre-camp for the US National Team this summer, and Elzinga plans to attend this summer. Maclaurin's submitted erg times to the National Team testing center placed him fifteenth on the depth chart this past march. Wehrili, a Swiss citizen, rows for his country's Junior National Team. And Bloom, a Canada native, may try to row for the Canadien Junior National Team.

Weiss and McCormack, as well as Elzinga, were both novices when they came to Harvard, and worked their way into the varsity ranks. Sophomore McCormack made the jump from the second freshman boat last year to the first varsity squad. This is especially significant given that the HVL program carries a third varsity and a second varsity boat, in which there are 16 other accomplished rowers.

Thus far, theses two crews have also experienced great success: the 2V boat is also undefeated, and the 3V team has defeated Penn, Cornell and Rutgers this year. Lenhart cited an important goal for the season: to win the Jope Cup, awarded each year to the league at the Eastern Sprints.

Combined with the national winning experience of Fallows and Lenhart--who have rowed together since attending Walt Whitman High School near Washington D.C.--the crew is poised for more great accomplishments. Yet, discussion is seldom made at the boathouse of individual merits. The focus of the crew is on the group identity of the boat, and not on the accolades of any individual.

"What is remarkable about the sport is that each one of us has personal limits but when we get in the boat, we push each another to transcend and rise above them," Weiss said.

Clearly, this crew has a strong sense of team unity, and at the core of this philosophy lies the coaching of Butt. Any of the rowers will defer to Butt's teaching when asked about their motivations.

"Charlie is a great coach because he knows the fine points of technical rowing and he also conveys how to win," Weiss said. "The boat knows how to win, but our challenge is to say mentally on top of the game and maintain our work ethic each day at practice."

The team places a high premium on mental toughness, on establishing competition at a mental level and on wearing down the resolve of its opponents.

In a lightweight boat race, all of the competitors are of roughly the same size and have trained for relatively the same period of time. As a result the margin of victory is determined more by concentration, and not necessarily by physiological superiority over the opposing crew.

Hence, the familiar boathouse idiom that "ergs don't float," emphasizing that brute power on the rowing machine does not necessarily translate into wins in he water. Butt often preaches the "nine on one" approach to racing. The crew and coxswain must function as one unified force, and view the opponent as nine independent rowers, any one of whom is vulnerable to "cracking" or having lapses in concentration.

As the Crimson looks forward to this weekend's competition and to the remainder of the race season, the continue their methodical approach to the sport--rowing with urgency and with consistent practice intensity. coach Butt reminds them that their strength comes from intellectualizing the race.

"One of Charlie's sayings is that you lose a race when you panic, and panicking is not knowing what to think," Fallows said.

The latest EARC coaches' poll ranks the Crimson second in the nation behind Princeton, but there are no predictions at the boathouse certainly this year's team atmosphere colored by the results of last season, which in this as was the defeat to Princeton at the 1998 Nationals.

"Last year, the crew was coming of a national championship victory in 1997, and this win may have led to a bit of complacency," Fallows said. "This year, coming of a loss at nationals, we are much more humble as a crew. We are always trying to learn from our mistakes and to improve our performance."