M. Crews fare well on home course

The Penn men's lightweight crew struggled, but the heavyweight and freshman boats both finished in the top four at the Head of the Schuylkill Regatta on Saturday. The heavyweight eight completed the nearly three-mile course in 13 minutes, 17.74 seconds. This time was good enough to earn the Quakers a fourth-place finish out of 31 teams. Brown was the only collegiate team to beat Penn. The National Team and the Penn Athletic Club team took home the top two spots, followed by the Bears and Quakers. Penn finished 12 seconds ahead of Navy and Princeton and 26 seconds ahead of Yale. "It was definitely our best race of the fall," senior Lewis Goettner said. "We've been making big improvements, week to week, race to race." The Quakers benefited from a change of order in the boat, as junior Bill Ennis and senior Timothy Thompson switched spots. Ennis moved to the seventh seat, while Thompson took the third seat. "It's strange how different ordering of the same people can go twice as fast," Goettner said. Penn finished one place and six seconds behind its 1998 performance, but this year's field was definitely more difficult, as both Brown and Princeton failed to compete in last year's Head of the Schuylkill. The Quakers' second heavyweight boat finished 23rd, ahead of the first boats from Georgetown and Virginia. Penn's freshman boat finished second on Saturday, trailing only Princeton in the 33-team field. The Quakers finished in 14:28.54, nearly 26 seconds behind the Tigers. The freshman race was a spread-out one, as more than five minutes separated first-place Princeton from the last-place Quaker Rowing Club boat. The heavyweights, however, monopolized the success on Saturday. Penn's lightweight eight did not row well at all and finished in a disappointing 23rd in the 24-team race. The Quakers outrowed Pittsburgh by more than 20 seconds, but were still far behind the rest of the field -- 1:33 behind Princeton and nearly 2:33 behind the first-place National team.