For the first time since 1997, the men's lightweight crew team opened its season by bringing home some hardware.
Yesterday, the Quakers won the Lev Brett Cup, a competition between Penn and Rutgers that has been contested since 1966.
"Any time you can start the season with a victory, it's a great victory," Penn coach Mike Irwin said.
Penn's varsity boat, made up of coxswain Colin Groshong, Ben Cooley, Pat Travers, Drew Zech, Chris Storm, Tim Mahoney, Dave Read, Sebastian Paraud and Sean Cronin, finished with a time of 5:42.8. Rutgers finished in 5:47.0.
"We had a very good starting sequence," Irwin said. "We took the lead in the first 500 [meters] and we never looked back."
The Quakers' freshman boat was victorious as well, beating the Scarlet Knights' boat with a time of 6:03.9.
However, Rutgers' second varsity beat Penn with a time of 5:48.6.
"We did what we've been doing all year: we rowed with intensity and power," said Read, the team's captain. "One of our strengths was that we remained composed. Rutgers is a great team; they have much depth. They did a good job today."
Because of the rain, the course was moved from the Raritan River in New Brunswick, N.J., to Lake Carnegie in Princeton, N.J.
"The Raritan would have been unsafe because of raging currents and debris," Irwin said. "We moved the race to Lake Carnegie, a neutral site."
The Red and Blue now prepare for the Matthews-Leonard Cup against Cornell and Harvard next Saturday on the Schuylkill River.
"Harvard and Cornell are going to be tough," Irwin said. "Our opponents will get tougher and tougher each week."
Read promised that the greater competition would be matched by greater intensity in training.
"We will be getting more and more strokes in this week," Read said. "Practice becomes exponentially more important as the season progresses."
