M. Crew teams head to San Diego for season opener

The 1998 Eastern Sprints champion Quakers heavyweight crew and the seventh-ranked Penn lightweight crew start their seasons this weekend. The Penn men's crew team left bright and early yesterday morning, heading for sunny California to compete with many of the nation's elite rowing teams in this weekend's San Diego Crew Classic. The heavyweight varsity eight enters the Classic ranked sixth nationally in the preseason USRowing Collegiate Coaches Poll. Penn trails rowing powerhouses Princeton, California, Washington, Yale and Harvard, but the Quakers aren't putting a lot of stock in the rankings. "We haven't even raced a race yet and they think they know who is No. 1," 15th-year Penn coach Stan Bergman said. "That's who the coaches think is better than us, we don't necessarily think that. We don't intend to be ranked No. 6 by the end of the year." Heavyweight captain Greg Rauscher echoed his coach's sentiments. "Pre-season rankings are based on the fall, which we don't worry that much about," Rauscher said. In the fall, crews compete in three-mile head races such as the Head of the Charles. In the more important spring season, races are shorter sprints held over 2,000-meter courses. "We know that we're better than some of those other boats like Harvard or Yale. We just have to go out and do it." The varsity eight "went out and did it" last year at Eastern Sprints, which serve as the championships for the traditionally strong Ivy League and other top East Coast crews like Northeastern and Wisconsin. The Quakers, winless in Cup races and ranked fourth in the EARC poll heading into the '98 Sprints, stunned the field with a victory -- edging Harvard by 0.6 seconds and third-place Princeton by 1.3 seconds. "Polls don't count," Bergman said. "We're going to control Penn rowing, that's all we can do." The heavyweights lost a strong senior class but Penn returns five rowers and coxswain Mark Redding from last year's Eastern Sprints Championship eight. "We expect to be really good this year," Bergman said. "You can't say we're rebuilding, we're just moving on, we have good depth and good, hard-nosed guys." Among those hard-nosed guys are Rauscher and senior Garret Miller, a two-time world champion as a member of the U.S. national team eight and Penn's commodore for the '99 season. The four rowers moving up to fill vacated spots on the first varsity boat for the race in San Diego are seniors Dave Blake and Joe Corcoran, junior Greg Jenemann and sophomore Doug Sieg. The lineup for the first varsity boat is not yet set in stone, though. "Tim Thompson was on the first varsity," Bergman said. "He's coming back from a broken rib and doing a great job but he'll be second varsity for this race. [Sophomore] Bill Beck will be back in two weeks. So the first boat could change depending on how it works out with guys returning." Despite the uncertain status of the final lineup for this year's varsity eight, Rauscher is exceedingly confident. "[We're] definitely ahead of where we were last year at this time," Rauscher said. "Our focus is to win everything -- IRAs, Sprints, everything. The difference between winning and losing is how well we row together." Not to be overlooked is Penn's lightweight crew team, which returns a talented group of rowers. Despite an injury-riddled '98 season that ended with a disappointing eighth-place finish at Eastern Sprints, the Quakers -- led by captain Dan Blaney and commodore Jed Cridland -- are ranked No. 7 nationally in the USRowing preseason poll on the strength of their returnees. Penn welcomes back 12 letterwinners from last year's top two boats. Even more so than at heavyweight, the Ivy League dominates the national scene in lightweight rowing. Led by national No. 1 Princeton, all seven Ivy crews -- Brown does not row lightweight -- are ranked in the top 10. "We're a very strong boat this year, maybe the best in a long time for the lightweight team," Penn first-boat coxswain Lauren Leiman said. "When you deal with rowing in the Ivy League and Sprint League, Rutgers, MIT, Navy and Georgetown, it's really very competitive. We're really looking at the best of the best." Leiman, a sophomore who made the jump from last year's top freshman eight, wasn't sure where Penn would finish in the ultra-competitive league. "I really have no clue [where we stand]," Leiman said. "It's very hard to judge where people are, and everyone wants to win, but it really comes down to the end of the year. Teams can lose all their dual meets but win at Sprints." The lightweights, guided by eighth-year coach Bruce Konopka -- who captained the 1977 and '78 Penn lightweight crews that went undefeated in Cup races -- host Harvard and Cornell for the Matthews-Leonard Cup next Saturday on the Schuylkill. While the annual trip to the San Diego Crew Classic is a favorite of the Penn crews, it's doubly exciting in that it is the first race of the year. "The great thing is that they're all top-quality teams there and we really won't face Cal or Washington [again] until the National Championships [IRAs] in June," Rauscher said. After the Eastern Sprints in early May, Penn and other top crews from the East have an opportunity at IRAs to face off against Washington, Cal and other nationally ranked crews which do not compete at the Eastern Sprints for the national title. Bergman agreed with his captain about the season-opening San Diego Crew Classic serving as good practice -- but it is still a race. "We obviously want to do well," Bergman said. "Eastern Sprints and IRAs are our major goals but we're not going out [to San Diego] to lose." Junior Radley Spring also noted the barometric qualities of this race. "We know we've got speed," said Spring, who will row with the second varsity eight this weekend. "We're looking to test out the competition." Spring was overwhelmingly positive in comparing the speed of this year's second boat to last year's, which took second at Eastern Sprints. "We're definitely better as far as [ergometer] scores and the flow within the boat [this year]," Spring said. "I think our boat is moving much faster. I'm extremely excited, this will be our first true test of speed." Erg scores, for the uninitiated, refer to one's times on the ergometer -- rowing machine -- and are used as one gauge of a rower's abilities. While numbers and statistics are nice, they don't tell the whole story. When the teams head to the line on race day, many factors come into play. "The biggest competition is going to be from themselves," Bergman said. "They're going to have to handle any situation they can control, then they'll have the opportunity to win. But if they let outside things get to them -- wind, waves, their opponent, anything. When [all the rowers out there are] physiologically the same, the guys that can psychologically handle the pressure best usually end up winning."