Hwt. Eight satisfied with its top-10 finish on the Charles

One by one, the boats left the starting line on the Charles River, heading upstream on a three-mile course cluttered with six bridges and numerous turns. This was anything but a typical 2,000-meter crew race of simultaneously starting boats on a relatively straight course. But that's what makes the Head of the Charles Regatta, held last weekend on the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge, such a spectacle of a race. "This is pretty much the biggest race of the fall season," Penn heavyweight crew member Keith Sutter said. "This is the race where we saw the most competition that we'll have to compete against in the spring at one race." International crew teams, club teams and most of the top universities in America were represented at the Head of the Charles Regatta, and Penn performed amicably, but not superbly, at the competition. The Quakers' varsity eight crew finished ninth out of 46 boats -- one place behind their finish of a year ago. "We try to get in the top 10 if we can every year," Penn heavyweight crew coach Stan Bergman said. "We'd like to be higher but I think they had a pretty good performance." Penn's time of 15 minutes, 38.29 seconds was 7.08 seconds behind eighth-place Yale but ahead of Ivy League rival Harvard -- a team that finished fifth in 1998. The Quakers' lightweight eight scored a major improvement over last year, rising to 11th place out of 23 teams after a 16th-place finish a year ago. The lightweight boat accomplished this despite a disadvantaged position of starting 20th. Unlike in most races, the boats were started in intervals of 10 to 20 seconds -- not all at once. "After 19 boats [have gone] in front of you, the water gets pretty lumpy," Konopka said. Harvard and Princeton were both penalized one minute for interference in the race, allowing Penn to technically finish ahead both, although the Quakers' time of 16:11.30 was slower than that rowed by the Crimson and the Tigers. Yale and Cornell also finished ahead of Penn. Penn's freshman boat did not repeat its second-place performance from a year ago but still managed to take home a seventh-place finish in a 45-team race. "We need to row together better," said freshman Jon Rosen, who rowed in the eight and is also a Daily Pennsylvanian staff writer. "We each individually have a lot of power, but we have to collectively get more power together." The Quakers freshmen finished ahead of Princeton, Harvard and Brown, but were disappointed about being passed by Yale -- a team that would go on to finish second in the race. "We got walked on by Yale," Rosen said. "That was something we didn't expect and we weren't really happy with it all." Penn's other team in the competition, the second heavyweight boat, finished 30th in the championship eight men's race, ahead of several varsity eights, including Rutgers and St. Joseph's. The Head of the Charles, like many of the fall head races, was three miles long -- more than twice the distance of the standard spring sprint distance of 2,000 meters. "The way we tried to approach it was to maintain a constant speed," Penn heavyweight crew member Greg Jenemann said. "It's so long you can't really have any bursts." In addition, the course was quite a change from the straight, flat Schuylkill River. "There are quite a few bridges you have got to go under and the coxswains have to negotiate a lot of turns," Bergman said. "You have to steer a lot on the course." But the Penn crew will be rowing in a more familiar territory this Saturday in the Head of the Schuylkill Race in Philadelphia. The United States national team and Princeton are expected to be among the Quakers' competition.

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