M. Crew focused on Harvard and Midshipmen

The Penn men's crew team has high aspirations against Ivy League rival Harvard at the Adams Cup. Question: What's more enjoyable than the irony of outracing Navy in boats? Answer: Outracing Harvard at anything. The Quakers' heavyweight rowers hope to accomplish both these feats at their Saturday morning race on the Charles River in Boston, Mass. The Adams Cup will pit the Quakers against the Crimson for the third time this season. Each side has won once, with Harvard beating Penn by five seconds in the heats of the Copley Cup in San Diego, and the Red and Blue returning the favor the following day to finish fourth in the grand finals. This may not be the last time the two teams race as they could meet again at Eastern Sprints and the IRAs. Both opponents are coming off cup wins from last weekend. Harvard edged a strong Princeton crew -- the Tigers won of the Childs Cup on April 11 -- which rowed against Harvard without one of its normal varsity eight rowers who was out with tonsillitis. The Crimson victory propelled them to second in the latest EARC poll behind Yale, with Penn fourth. Meanwhile, Navy vanquished Cornell and Syracuse. With several close defeats, the Quakers are searching for that little something that can push them into victory lane. "In the past two races we've flown off the start and we've had a good sprint, but we've lost a little speed at the base rate," heavyweight oarsman Dixon Gillis said. "We've been working on the middle section of the race." In an attempt to improve their times, Coach Bergman has experimented with moving his bowman, Nick Tripician, into the seven seat and creating a "bucket" between five-seat Garrett Miller and four-seat Greg Rauscher. A bucket occurs when the boat does not alternate port-starboard from stroke to bow, but instead has two consecutive men rowing the same side somewhere in the shell. In order to equal last year's 3-2 record in cup races, Penn must sweep their remaining regattas. The Quakers would like nothing better than confiscating the Adams Cup, a cup honoring Charles Francis Adams, a Harvard graduate and later secretary of the Navy. Twenty-two times the cup has made its way to Philadelphia since May 27, 1933, with Penn's last victory in 1991. In the meantime, the lightweights hope history doesn't repeat itself -- again. They travel to Lake Carnegie to challenge Princeton for the Wood-Hammond Cup in hopes of ending their drought against the Tigers. Princeton has won the cup the last 23 years, although several times the finishes have been close, particularly in 1983 and '93 when the Quakers were edged by a mere tenth of a second. Princeton won last year's Eastern Sprints and is coming off a victory against Rutgers and Cornell for the Platt Cup.