U.S. Collegiate Rowing – Instalment 5 – The Champions are Challenged

With the end of the Collegiate regular season in sight, the races are really heating up as crews edge towards their true speed and top teams cross paths with each other. This weekend offered some surprisingly closes races including a few where the outcome was far from expected. 

NCAA Women’s Division 1

Week 4 Polls

This week’s poll was very stale as the coaches are beginning to solidify in their opinions now they have plenty of information about how programs are stacking up against each other. The one significant change in the rankings was from Penn as their win over Virginia moved them up two spots to eighth ahead of both Virginia and Syracuse.

Another team worth watching is Columbia they had a great set of results last weekend but couldn’t quite crack the top twenty as they were left as the best of the rest after not having received any votes all season.

Lake Wheeler Invitational

Eighteen high-quality programs came together at Lake Wheeler in Raleigh, North Carolina with many of them looking to launch a final push towards the conference and National Championships which are quickly approaching.

The most notable result at the top of the time sheets will be #9 Syracuse getting the better of #8 Penn. This is their second meeting of the season and the Orange managed to get the victory both times, albeit by very narrow margins.

Further down the pecking order another upset came when Oklahoma got the better of Tennessee, the sooners have struggled in recent years, but this result suggests that new Head Coach Sarah Trowbridge has the crew moving in the right direction to stir things up at the Big 12 Championships.

Week 5 Duals

For the previous 203 weeks, the #1 Texas Longhorns First Varsity Eight had not been defeated, but 22 races against 77 opponents, they travelled to New Jersey where they fell to #4 Princeton. The Tigers got off the line quicker than the Longhorns, like many had in the last four years but they were able to resist to storming diesel engine to finish with a 0.8 second gap. Also upset in this race were #3 Yale who were, by historical standards, close to Texas but were 4.2 seconds adrift of Princeton.

The upsets continued as Texas were last of the three in the Second Varsity Eights and behind Princeton in the Varsity Fours. These results really shake up any aspersions that Texas were going to cruise to their third successive national title and open the field to a few schools who will try to snatch the crown, now Texas has been shaken.

Elsewhere, there was another top-ten clash on the Montlake Cut in Spokane as #6 Washington hosted #7 California for the 46^th annual UW-Cal dual. It was the huskies who came out on top by a rather commanding margin crossing the finish line 5.9 seconds ahead of the Golden Bears from Berkeley. This margin was far greater than expected but California will have an opportunity to respond soon at the Pac-12 Championships in Oregon.

On any other week, the results from Bloomington would have been the leading story as #20 Indiana’s First Varsity Eight got the better of their counterparts from #12 Ohio State. Beating the defending Big Ten Champions at all would be a big story but the Hoosiers did it in style finishing with a margin of 4.5 seconds over the Buckeyes, adding another ingredient into a spicy looking Big Ten Championships.

#1 Texas were able to quickly respond travelling down south from New Jersey to race #10 Virginia and responded with a confident win to round off their regular season, sweeping the board and finishing 7.6 seconds ahead of the Cavaliers in the Varsity Eight, showing that they won’t go down without a fight.

IRA Heavyweight Men’s Division 1

Week 4 Polls

After their surprise victory over Harvard, Princeton shot up this week’s poll moving into a share of fifth position, while the Crimson slipped to number seven. Northeastern’s win over Brown profited them two poll places, while the Bears from Rhode Island moved down three spots to the edge of the top ten.

Further down the poll, improvements in the results of Georgetown and Navy moved them up to sixteenth and seventeenth respectively, while Temple were the biggest fallers, down four spots to twentieth.

111^th UW-Cal Dual

Alongside their female counterparts, the #1 California Golden Bears travelled to race #3 Washington one of the oldest rivalries in all of West Coast sport. As defending national champions with largely the same line-up, California would be expected to put the sword to Washington, but the Huskies were able to stay well in contention holding on to the Californians before moving back to narrow the gap to just 1.2 seconds in slow conditions as they crossed the line. This suggests that Washington are a force to be reckoned with as well as potentially showing that Scott Frandsen’s international band of Golden Bears may not be as unbeatable as they may have seemed.

Week 4 East Coast Duals

On the East Coast too, there were some uncomfortably close results for major contenders, the most notable of which happened on Camden Lake where #5 Princeton hosted #2 Yale and held on to them all the way down the track, eventually losing by less than a second. While missing out on the Carnegie Cup, the Tigers will take pride in that result demonstrating that they are the real deal and can give anyone a run for their money.

Another close outcome was in store on the Schuylkill as #7 Harvard’s troubles continued as they were only able to put a 3 second margin into #14 Penn and less than ten seconds into embattled #17 Navy. This margin will be good news for the Quakers however as they look to move up the poll towards the Petite Final.

Coming Up Next Weekend

In the final weekend of Regular Season action, there is plenty of action to come by. The largest race of the weekend is Women’s Eastern Sprints with a large field including #5 Brown, #9 Syracuse, #15 Harvard and #16 Rutgers among others. This will present an opportunity for those on the East Coast, who will not be able to count on an automatic bid from winning their conference, to position themselves for at-large selections from the committee. Other notable events include #2 Stanford and #7 California hosting #13 SMU and #19 Iowa out west with newly anointed favourites #4 Princeton host #8 Penn. These will be opportunities from the challengers to demonstrate their readiness to take the crown that may have come lose this weekend.

On the men’s side, it is busy too. #9 Stanford who are still unbeaten, will measure themselves up against #1 California. While on the east coast, #5 Princeton will race #10 Brown and in Boston #8 Northeastern will have a busy time racing #7 Harvard on Saturday and #11 Wisconsin on Sunday. Further north, #5 Dartmouth host an invitational, the highlight of which is likely to be their race against #4 Syracuse.

This busy weekend of racing will top off an exciting regular season of U.S. Collegiate Rowing before we turn to the conference championships and national championship qualifying events on the horizon.

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