Slow starts doom Lwt. Crew at IRAs

Sluggish out of the gate, Penn finishes 12th in 13-team field on Cooper River. Penn's lightweight crew finished 2.3 seconds ahead of Boston College in its qualifying heat last weekend at the IRA Championships. Unfortunately for the Quakers, the Eagles were the only team that the Penn varsity eight beat on the day. In the Petite Final of the lightweight race on Cooper River in N.J., the Quakers finished last -- giving the Penn boat a 12th-place finish in the 13-team field. The Quakers even finished more than five seconds behind Boston College. "I was [happy] with our heat in the morning," Penn coach Bruce Konopka said. "But certainly not in the afternoon with our final race. I'm not sure what it was, if it was a combination of the heat and the weight loss, but we just didn't have as strong a race as we did in the morning." In the morning, the Quakers' boat made up for a slow start with a quicker body of the race and a strong push toward the finish to grab third place in the four-team field. Penn finished 3.5 seconds behind Yale and six seconds behind Columbia in the heat, as the Quakers were not able to make up ground on the top two boats. "We were rehearsing starts for about two weeks before," Konopka said. "Part of the problem was we we're doing them on our own so you really can't gauge how well it's going." The boat did not start much faster in the afternoon and rowed only 3.6 seconds faster in the Petite Final. "I think the guys were pretty gassed just making weight," Konopka said. In the races, Penn experimented with yet another new lineup. Sophomore Mark Hodgson replaced senior Alex Muniz in the stroke seat, but the change had little effect. "Most of the guys in the boat thought it went better with Mark stroking," Konopka said. "But we came to the conclusion that no matter who was stroking, the boat was going to go the same, so it was a matter of trying someone else." Penn almost beat UC-Davis in its Petite Final, but the Aggies edged the Quakers by 7/10ths of a second. "We were neck with them the entire way," Konopka said. Harvard finished first and Rutgers second in the lightweight Grand Final -- a race that Penn has not qualified for since 1996. The Penn lightweights had more success with their four-man boat, however. Normally a heavyweight event, four Quakers lightweights rowed in the freshman four-man open. The boat finished third in the Petite Final in 6:54.60, just 3/10ths of a second ahead of Navy. Although the boat officially placed ninth, its time was the eighth-fastest among freshmen four-man boats.

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