Colin Groshong may have graduated from Penn all the way back in 2007, but the Red and Blue are still following him.
Well maybe just the Blue.
Groshong, in front of former Penn lightweight rowing teammates and coaches, coxed the Oxford first team "Blue" boat to a win in the 155th incarnation of its paramount contest against Cambridge, known simply as "The Boat Race." The 2009 edition was held March 29 on the Thames River.
Oxford finished a full 12 seconds in front of Cambridge, claiming a victory in a race that former Penn assistant coach John Fife considers on par with the Olympics.
"The Boat Race is probably the second-most prestigious race in the world," Fife said in an e-mail. "There were in fact five Olympic oarsmen in Colin's boat."
Leading a team of elite athletes in a foreign country, Groshong may have felt pressured or intimidated. But for him, being a stranger in a strange land never factored into his mind.
"To be honest, I always saw myself as an Oxford student and a member of the boat club," Groshong, who is finishing his final year studying Comparative Politics, said in an e-mail. "We always considered ourselves a unit from Oxford."
But not so long ago Groshong was a member of a unit from Penn.
From freshman to senior year, Groshong served as the coxswain for the Quakers lightweight rowing team, and he was elected to the position of commodore in his final year.
Groshong excelled throughout his Penn career, doing enough to earn the title of "Best coxswain I've ever coached" from Fife.
Groshong led the Red and Blue to an eighth-place finish in the end-of-season IRA Regatta in June 2007. That was the best finish for Penn's lightweight rowers since their third-place finish in 2005.
Groshong credits his experiences in (and outside of) Philadelphia with the Quakers as great preparation for the monumental task he faced on the Thames.
"I learned how to cox longer races and learned what needed to be said and the manner in which I needed to say things," Groshong said. "These experiences definitely played a large role in my selection for the Boat Race as well as my performance on the day."
Yet it seemed for a while like Groshong would not be able to put all of those fortuitous experiences to good use.
Last fall, Groshong was hit by a car and had to have surgery on his collarbone.
The injury kept him out of practice for several months, and was the last thing he needed after a disappointing season the year before that saw him qualify for neither Oxford's "Blue" boat nor its "Isis" boat, which is the second-tier team.
But Groshong feels like it was a blessing in disguise.
"[The injury] allowed me to step back from rowing a bit and see it from a different perspective," Groshong said.
And as the scoreboard proved, sometimes it takes one step back to take two steps forward.
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