Freshmen Heavyweights Pace Crimson at IRAs

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—After 106 years, the time was ripe for a change. For the first time ever in its long and storied history, the 2009 Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships was moved from its usual east coast location to Sacramento, Calif., where the nation’s top crews duked it out from Thursday through Saturday.

The 2000-meter Lake Natoma course played host to five men’s heavyweight events (a reduction from previous years) as well as a men’s and women’s lightweight competition. Also making its first appearance in this year’s iteration of the regatta was a new selection standard, which required boats to now qualify for entry while prohibiting club teams from participating.

Despite the change, the field remained loaded with contenders.

"The strongest field across the board I've seen, at least in the years we've been going to the IRAs," Harvard coach Harry Parker called it.

Pacific-10 conference rivals Cal, Stanford, and Washington represented the heavyweight favorites, but defending champion Wisconsin was not to be forgotten either. And of course, the Ancient Eight, led by Harvard and Brown, intended to make its presence felt.

The only team to enter all of the regatta’s events, the Crimson’s best showing came in the freshmen division, where its rookies proved undeterred by their cross-country trek, winning a silver medal to give the team its only top-three finish.

“A heroic effort, a really unified effort,” freshman coach Bill Manning said. “Probably the best batch of 19-year-olds on the water today.”

Heavily-favored Washington, featuring not only an Olympian but also members of the German and Canadian under-23 teams, jumped out to an early lead in the freshman eight grand final and never looked back. Thus the bulk of the drama involved the fight for the second place, as the field remained even for the first 300 meters. The Crimson got off to an unfavorable start, finding itself in dead last after 500 meters, but it then began to challenge for a medal.

“Looked like they got off to an atrocious start…it looked terrible,” Manning said.

With 750 meters remaining, Cornell and Harvard were gaining ground on second-place Brown, and a frantic sprint to the finish allowed the Crimson to pass the Bears and come out ahead by less than four tenths of a second. The comeback came two days after the boat took first place over Cal in its heat, which gave it an automatic berth in the final.

But in the regatta’s marquee event, the Harvard varsity eight came up a little short. The Crimson was never truly in contention for first, which for most of the race was occupied by either the top-seeded Golden Bears or the Cardinals. Surging from the rest of the pack late in the contest, Washington caught Cal with about 250 meters left and pulled ahead in the final 100 meters to win by nine tenths of a second.

“They’re really strong people, people who have raced at senior world championships…even Olympians,” Crimson stroke Simon Gawlik said of the caliber of rowers at the regatta. “That’s a level of athlete that Harvard right now, at least, doesn’t have.”

Harvard’s fifth place finish, nearly eleven seconds behind the leader, was especially disheartening considering that the Brown boat was three ticks faster. Harvard had beaten its Ivy rival in its first heat by over two seconds, a satisfying reversal of last month’s Eastern Sprints. But the Bears found a little extra on Saturday and did the best out of the crews hailing from east of the Mississippi.

“The varsity was a little disappointed,” Parker said. “They probably were just a little bit more tired from the hard racing on Thursday and Friday than they realized. They didn’t quite have enough left. They raced extremely well on Thursday and Friday, and it caught up to them.”

Nonetheless, the performance was a vast improvement upon last year’s failure to even make the IRA grand final.

Washington’s victory in the most prestigious race of the day capped a marvelous performance by the Husky rowers, who also took the second varsity eight grand final. While Brown and BU made strong showings for their coast, the fifth-place Crimson exhibited competitive spirit in the face of adversity. The night before the grand final, captain Teddy Schreck was struck with an apparent bout of dehydration and remained in the team hotel on Saturday.

“I was particularly impressed with the aggressiveness of their race after having to make the last-minute change,” Parker said. “They raced really well, I thought. I was very proud of them.”

Schreck’s replacement, rising junior Phil Matthews, was pulled up from Harvard’s entries in the four-man events.

The Crimson finished fifth in the grand final of the varsity fours, which was won by a Cal crew that had to fight off a late charge by Washington.

The open four, an event requiring at least one freshman and one upperclassman among the oarsmen in the crew, saw Harvard finish second in the petite final behind Cornell and eighth overall, following lackluster fifth and third-place finishes in the first heat and repéchage, respectively.

Although classes are long gone and commencement has passed too, the Crimson heavyweights are still hard at work. Its final race of a long season will be this Saturday, as Harvard takes on Yale in the 144th Harvard-Yale Regatta in New London, Conn.

The Crimson lightweights took bronze in the seven-boat final, the lone men’s lightweight race, finishing behind Princeton and Yale. As expected, the undefeated Tigers dominated, winning by almost five seconds. The Bulldogs, on the other hand, narrowly emerged victorious in the fight for second, a late comeback Harvard was none too happy about, since Yale had placed fifth at Eastern Sprints.

“[The Crimson] performed very well…fact is, they gave their best and it didn’t happen for them today,” lightweight coach Charley Butt said. “We knew that [Yale] was going to be a lot faster. For their standard they’ve been off this year, but to see them put it together was not a surprise.”

“It’s a big turnaround from last year, and we’re maybe a little disappointed to be in third place today, but we’re still going home with a medal,” captain Jeff Overington added.