Rowing teams push on into the summer

Classes may have ended, but some students are facing finals of a very different variety.

With the season coming to a close, Penn rowing has been competing in a host of monumentally important events, notching impressive results along the way.

Leading the pack was the lightweight squad, which, thanks to an excellent performance at Eastern Sprints on Sunday, May 15, will be heading back to the Intercollegiate Rowing Association national championships for the second-straight year. This is the first time Penn will be represented at the IRA’s two years straight since 2006-07.

In the Grand Final race, the Quakers’ Varsity earned a fifth-place finish following Yale, Columbia, Princeton and Cornell, which rounded out the top four. Penn stayed right with the leaders of the pack for the majority of the one-kilometer race, and clocked in fast enough to secure entry to the IRA’s. Additionally, the second Varsity will be rowing in the high stakes regatta, but will be splitting up into two boats of four after coming out on top over Georgetown, Dartmouth and MIT.

Explaining the road ahead for Penn after this achievement, sophomore 2V rower Joe Ebner is ready for the big time: June 2 on Mercer Lake, N.J.

“After an emotional team banquet where the graduating seniors spoke their final piece to the team last Monday, those remaining for IRA training have found a new gear of motivation to keep chopping even harder for this grand finale to their careers,” Ebner said. “We are entering the same varsity 8 lineup we put out at Sprints and bringing two fours composed of the second varsity 8, one will have a coxswain and one will not.”

Ebner continued to explain the progress resulting from such motivation.

“These boats have been hitting the training regiment hard with two practices a day in the aftermath of finals. Every boat has been picking up speed, but we can’t expect the race will be handed to us. The onus is on ourselves to keep training hard, and we’re excited to do something special in two weeks.”

Meanwhile, women’s rowing did some damage of their own at the Ivy League Championships on May 15, securing a fifth-place result. Penn finished with a grand total of 46 points, beating out Dartmouth, Columbia and Cornell, while Brown edged out Princeton at 83 points to secure the title.

The Quakers’ Varsity finished second only behind the nation’s top-boat Brown in the preliminaries, with three seconds to spare over Harvard. In the final, three top-10 boats for the Red and Blue competed, finishing fourth — their highest mark to date. Penn’s second Varsity 8 came in third in its head, with the V4 and V4B boats picking up bronzes in their respective races.

Reflecting on his team’s overall performance, coach Wesley Ng was pleased with the effort and results for the day.

“I thought the team competed in a way that reflected our preparations for the year. There were bright spots in our races that I saw. We had good starting speed in our eights and better closing speed in our fours and overall we made positive strides,” Ng said.

Looking to next year, he added, “I believe the results showed that we had a continual upward trajectory throughout the year and we ended on our best note. The group now sees what is possible, where the gaps in our training and preparation are, and how much fun it is to invest fully. We have the tools to be successful and now have to develop the willingness and consistency to use them on a daily basis.”

They will be graduating seven seniors, but have an incoming recruiting class of 16 rowers and coxswain to chase trophies down the road.

Lastly, the heavyweights placed ninth in Eastern Sprints regatta last week, which is on par with their form from last year. Moreover, this is the first top-10 finish in consecutive years for the program since 2001-02.

Coming in at an 11 seed, the Quakers ground out a bit of an upset overall. Finishing in third, Penn’s crew topped Dartmouth’s squad in the Petite Final, which had defeated them weeks back in the final cup race of the 2016 season. Second and third varsities each notched twelfth overall, and both also picked up sixth in their own Petite Finals.

The Red and Blue heavies will also be headed to the IRA Regatta at the beginning of June.

So, while Van Pelt might have emptied out for the summer, the boat house is still at full capacity as Penn makes its last push for new silverware.

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