W. Crew opens year at home

The Penn women's crew team launches its spring season tomorrow at 10 a.m. with a home race on the Schuylkill River, where the varsity squad welcomes Navy, Yale and Columbia. Senior co-captains Melinda Patterson and Heather Roehrs will lead the Quakers into their season debut. "They'll all be tough teams but we think it will be fun," Patterson said. Coach Barb Kirch enters her second season of competition at Penn with aspirations to quickly elevate the team's status. The Quakers finished the 1998 season with a 3-6 overall record (1-4 Ivy League) and an unexpected at-large bid to the National Collegiate Women's Rowing Championship -- Penn's first ever. This year's team should continue to improve in its eight weekends of competition, which will hopefully conclude at the end of May with the NCAA Championships in Sacramento, Calif. "We are very well prepared and this is one of the strongest Penn teams we've had," Patterson said. "We're much stronger than we were last year; we're a lot better off than we were last spring," agreed junior Rachel Jolley, a member of the varsity four boat which advanced to the NCAA championships last year. Juniors Kealy O'Connor, Margaret Klarberg and Diane Lincoln, and sophomore coxswain Catherine Eikel also return from that group. This weekend, the Quakers will also feature a brand new shell in which to race. "We just got a new boat last Friday," Jolley said. "We've never ridden in this kind of boat before so it's a change but also a big opportunity."