M. Crew teams hope for wins at home

Hoping to rebound from a weekend that saw none of the men's crew boats finish first, both the heavyweights and lightweights will race on the Schuylkill River tomorrow against Yale and Columbia. The heavies will compete in the Blackwell Cup and the lightweights will challenge for the Dodge Cup. Penn would like to keep the Blackwell Cup right here in Philadelphia after last year's victory on the Harlem. In all, Penn has won the cup 30 times since its creation in 1927. The Quakers are hoping to make it 31 and begin a streak to rival the one from '87 to '93 when they won it seven years running. Strong performances will go far in erasing the bad taste left from the results on the Harlem River and Lake Cayuga last Saturday. "We're hoping to beat them both by a good margin," Penn commodore Matt Guerrieri said. "We've worked hard on the second half of the race and hopefully this will put us over the top." The heavier varsity rowers have already raced head-to-head with both teams, beating Columbia and losing to Yale by less than two seconds for the Copley Cup in Mission Bay. For the oarsmen under 160 pounds, the race will be equally as challenging as they race the team that placed first -- by more than seven seconds -- in their division of the San Diego Crew Classic. "Yale looks real good," sophomore rower Sandy Henderson said. "Their freshmen and JV won Eastern Sprints and they lost only one senior from last year's varsity boat. They'll be coming on strong." By contrast, Columbia has traditionally been a weaker program, but like their basketball program, they seem to be on the rise. "Columbia is a program that's been getting stronger over the last couple of years and they've pulled good ergs this winter," Henderson said. Last weekend at the Child's Cup, the nation's oldest intercollegiate cup, the heavyweights outdistanced the Lions by almost 30 seconds but were nipped for first at the finish by Princeton. The Quakers had a good start with their stroke rating in the upper 40s and held the lead for the first half of the race. Princeton evened at 1,200 meters and gradually created distance. "They had a boat-length on us at 500 meters when we started coming on strong, but ran out of length," Guerrieri said. "We were pretty upset because we could have beaten Princeton." The final times were Princeton 6:05.74, Penn 6:06.47 and Columbia 6:34.53. The Quakers' second varsity, first freshmen and second freshmen also placed second behind Princeton. The first freshmen's race was particularly eventful as a pleasure boat created an enormous wake, which was magnified by the concrete barriers to either side of the Harlem River. The wake soon deposited several inches of water in the shell of all three boats. This made rowing as difficult as doing pull-ups with 50-lb. weights attached to both ankles. "We just tried to survive," freshman Doug Sieg said. "We tried to regroup and get our boat speed going but it was impossible." While the heavyweights were in New York, the lightweights were in calmer waters at Cornell, where Harvard captured the Matthews Cup with a time of 6:19.5. Penn finished third (6:38.0) as the second Quakers varsity was the only boat not to finish third on Lake Cayuga. "Both boats, especially Harvard, were getting a lot more run and we weren't getting full slide," varsity rower Terrance Demorest said. "We rowed at three-fourths slide."