The 2024 EARC season begun last week. Northeastern beat Penn for the Burk Cup in New Jersey and Brown routed Boston University (BU) for the Michalson cup on the Seekonk. These races and results and the publication of the IRCA pre season poll mark the beginning of endless discussion, rankings and predictions about who is better than who and who might upset who at Eastern Sprints or IRAs.
The first races of the season actually tell us very little, as crews are often racing in very different shape, line-ups and conditions to those that they will race in the latter half of the season, but also because so little is truly known about the new iteration of each program. There is always much chatter about it being ‘so and so’s year’ or that ‘X and Y have lost some key athletes’ but every spring there are surprise winners and losers that no one foresees this time of year. Slowly but surely over the course of the season all will be revealed.
Michalson Cup
With all of that having been said, #7 Brown’s 11 second margin of victory over #13 BU is very surprising. BU were a team that was thought to be on the up and Paul Cooke’s program is famous in recent years for starting slowly before discovering blistering late season speed. I had expected Brown to win but not by anything like that margin. Rufus Biggs, assistant coach at Brown does note that steering may have played a role in the size of the disparity, saying “At points in the varsity race, the two crews were far apart in their lanes which may have impacted the overall steering and final margin”. Moreover, Anyone who has raced on the Seekonk knows that it can be a very tricky course, and so one wonders if Brown’s experience with the river provided them a substantial advantage over BU. We will get a much better sense of what this result means when Brown race Yale, Washington, Harvard, Northeastern and Stanford this coming Friday and Saturday at the Sarasota Invitational.
Burk Cup
Further, #6 Northeastern beat #11 Penn by 2.78 seconds, which to conventional wisdom suggest that Northeastern were not able to break contact. Whilst there are no such things as moral victories, and certainly not to Al Monte by all accounts of him, this appears to be a good result for Penn. Northeastern were an A final crew last year, and whilst they lost star stroke seat Rhett Burns they picked up a very promising freshman class, including Ed Lopas who represented New Zealand at the U23 world championships before matriculation. As such many people have them pegged to do very well this year, and so Penn’s result seems to suggest that the program, which won the award for the most improved program at the IRAs last year, continues to take strides in the right direction. Penn also fielded a 5V for the first time in a while, and having more people able to compete is always an exciting development.
All in all, two interesting results, and ones that build excitement for this week’s already fascinating Sarasota Invitational. It is the only multi lane racing in the east before Eastern Sprints and will be hotly contested between a slew of the best teams in the nation. Otherwise fans will be waiting to see the outcomes of their teams in the numerous duels and scrimmages in the coming weeks.
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