All 3 crew teams falter

and Jeremy Thompson Penn's crew teams wrapped up the fall season this past weekend with surprisingly disappointing showings. The heavyweight team traveled to Princeton with hopes of upsetting the Tigers on their home river, but it was not to be. Princeton's Championship Eight boats blew past the competition, taking first and second place. Penn's first Championship Eight finished seventh, the second Eight finished 15th and the third Eight came in last out of 27 teams. Assistant coach Larry Connell was very impressed -- and concerned -- by Princeton's domination. "Princeton showed they're very fast. A lot of crews will try to reach them, but they don't seem beatable right now," Connell said. Penn's Championship Four boats finished 11th and 16th out of a field of 33. The Quakers also raced four pairs, with the top boat finishing 12th. The other three pairs finished 13th, 19th and 20th. Coach Stan Bergman had hoped for more impressive results to dwell upon during the offseason. "We were a little disappointed," Bergman said. "The guys did a good job, but [our performance] showed that we need to improve our training. We need to pick it up a little bit." The lightweights fared considerably better than the heavyweights in the Frostbite Regatta on the Schuylkill River. The two lightweight boats finished in second and fourth, but they felt they should have won their respective races. The freshmen, however, provided reason for optimism by winning both the Youth Eight and Youth Four races. Coach Stan Konopka was not pleased with the results overall. "We did not perform very well. We had a really hard time with class schedules with some guys only being able to practice once or twice a week," he said. "If you don't train enough, you're not going to do very well." The women's crew teams did not finish their fall season in the fashion they had hoped. Both the varsity and the JV felt that they had an excellent chance of winning both of their races at the Frostbite Regatta, but, unfortunately, there was confusion about when the teams had to report to the starting line. As a result, both teams missed their races. Penn crew now enters three months of off-season training in which it will work on building endurance and strength. "We have a lot of hard work ahead of us this winter and we have good athletes. We'll challenge the best," Connell said.