As Championship season gears into action, there were two spots at the IRA National Championships awarded last weekend, with the Dad Vail Regatta taking the spotlight.
Dad Vail Regatta
Entering this one we knew it was going to be a showdown between the top two non-Sprints programmes on the east coast: #16 Drexel and #18 La Salle. La Salle lead the season series by two to one, but Drexel won the most recent meeting at the Bergen Cup. In Friday’s Semi Finals, the two comfortably progressed in nearly identical times setting up a barnstormer final on Saturday evening.
It certainly delivered on that promise as the two schools traded the lead throughout the first half of the race. In the third five hundred metres, Drexel made a phenomenal move to pull away from the field, getting the better of La Salle by open water as the Explorers only just managed to hold off the charging crew from #23 Templefor second. Canadian Western Ontario finished fourth ahead of Saint Joseph’s and the club team from Rutgers.
In the lower boats there was more shaken up. The Temple second eight beat two higher ranked setups to give them a positive shot if the first eight earn them a ticket to IRAs while Drexel were a class above in the third eight.
National Invitational Rowing Championships
In the battle of the North-East, MIT secured their place at IRAs as the only Division One team to make the grand final. When they got there, they were met with some of the top division three competition in the country. In the final it went down to the wire as the three medal-winning crews were separated by just over a second on Lake Quinsigamond. Wesleyan defended their unanimous number one spot on the division three polls, but the shock was from fourth-ranked Williams who beat MIT as well as the remainder of the top five to achieve second on Sunday.
In the lower boats, MIT lacked the depth one would imagine from a Division One programme, finishing in the petite final while both Marist and Hobart put their Junior Varsities into the Grand.
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