A Colonial reunion in Philadelphia

The men’s heavyweight crew team will open its spring season with a race layered with irony.

Tomorrow morning, Penn will take on George Washington, a team that has struggled in recent years but made a breakthrough last season when their varsity eight boat earned a spot in the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships.

And the man responsible for GWU’s turnaround?

None other than the Quakers’ new coach, Greg Myhr.

“I suspect [GWU is] a faster team than they were last year, even based on fall results,” Myhr said. “We were behind them [at the Oct. 25 Princeton Chase] … far enough behind to make me awful nervous.”

While Myhr is convinced the Penn program is not in as bad a position as GWU was when he began his tenure as Colonials head coach, he does have a similar job to do with the once-great Quakers.

“Building something back up is often more than just a one-year process,” he said, “but it has to start somewhere.”

Myhr is not alone in being new to his job — all of the men’s rowing head coaches and assistants are in their first year with Penn.

Lightweight coach Nick Baker is convinced the “jolt of energy” he claims to bring to the team is already making a difference to his crews.

“They’ve really responded well to that,” he said. “Speed on and off the water … has been a direct correlation to the extreme amount of work they’ve put in.”

According to men’s lightweight captain David Mannion, the new coaching staff will help the Quakers achieve “redemption.”

“We’ve not had the results in the last couple of years we think that we should have had,” Mannion said. “We put in a tremendous amount of work this winter, and boats that you see this spring — I guarantee you wouldn’t recognize them from the boats you saw in the fall.”

While fourth-year women’s head coach Mike Lane has been at Penn longer than most of his rowing colleagues, the women’s team has been implementing changes of its own.

At the start of the fall semester, Lane introduced a new fitness standard for the rowing machines the team uses when not on the water.

“Within the first three weeks, we had 90 percent of the team make the standard,” he said. “That was a big reason for our success this fall.”

That success included a second-place varsity eight finish at the Rivanna Romp back in November, the Quakers’ best result since Lane joined the program as an assistant coach over seven years ago.

The team will look to utilize their newfound level of fitness when they take on Columbia and No. 1 Yale for the Connell Cup tomorrow.

Lane is looking to exploit the Quakers’ home-water advantage, but Yale women’s coach Will Porter is no stranger to Boathouse Row. He spent three summers training on the “fast and furious” Schuylkill River as a member of the U.S. national team.

However, Porter believes that his Bulldogs will have to pull out all the stops to finish the season in the top seed.

“I don’t know that we deserve that ranking right now,” he said. “I don’t think we’re as fast as others maybe think that we are.”

Penn co-captain Jen Drossner is hoping this year will mark a change in the normally bad weather — and distant second-place finish — that seems to characterize this race.

“Obviously we want to beat Columbia,” the senior said, “but whether we’re closer to Columbia or closer to Yale kind of determines where we are in the competition.”

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