Hwt. Crew not fazed by 'lousy weather'

So what if the weather is bad this weekend.

The Penn heavyweight crew team will head to Princeton, N.J., where it will race Columbia and the host-Tigers for the Childs Cup on Saturday, without particularly caring what direction the water around them is coming from.

"We've been rowing in some lousy weather, but so has everybody else," Penn coach Stan Bergman said. "Everybody's got to learn how to handle it."

"You just suck it up," senior captain Brian Beck said.

The elements aside, Penn will have to face a Princeton team which it has not beaten in nine years and is currently ranked sixth in the nation by USRowing.com. The Lions, meanwhile, are unranked but received two votes in the latest poll.

"I want to beat [Princeton]," Beck said. "I've never beaten them and neither has anyone else on this team."

"I know Princeton is really strong. We saw them race in California" two weekends ago, Bergman said. "I think we'll be well-prepared to race."

Penn senior Hobey Stuart is trying to keep a level head about the regatta, which will feature four rounds -- the second freshman boat, first freshman boat, junior varsity, and varsity. Each race will feature all three schools, and the winner of the varsity race gets the trophy.

"You want to beat whoever you race, you never want to lose," Stuart said. "So it's just a matter of going out and racing hard."

He did concede, however, that beating Princeton would be "that much sweeter."

Of Columbia, Beck said that they are "a team that is not very good. They are a team that we have been able to beat" on a regular basis.

Although the USRowing rankings are perhaps the most high-profile in the nation for collegiate crew teams, the Penn team does not focus on them, at least until the end of the year when they are used to determine the seedings for the IRA Championships and Eastern Sprints.

"I really don't pay any attention to rankings," Bergman said. 'It's not like basketball, football, that kind of stuff."

"I have no clue if it's accurate or not," Stuart said of the poll. "I don't really care."

Despite the probable bad weather, this weekend's venue, Carnegie Lake, is one of the calmer waters in the northeast.

"Chances are that Carnegie Lake is going to have the best water of any in the near vicinity," Beck said. "We are going to have to deal with cold and rain, and that's not that big a deal."

Beck did concede that it will be nothing like the sunny, 80-degree climate the Quakers enjoyed during their trip to Stanford two weekends ago.

"That's just kind of the way it goes," he said.

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