Metro Cup Results
UCF opened it's season yesterday with wins over Rollins in the novice eight, V4, and V8. Rollins won the novice four. The closest race was the V4 which [pitted a Rollins heavyweight boat against] also had the most experienced UCF rowers. It looks like the Rollins four will be worth watching. This race gets new UCF head coach Andy Derrick off to a good start. [Thanks for the clarifying comments.]
In a Friday press release announcing this weekend's lineups and a recap of last year, UCF again ignores the lightweights' fine season to focus on the heavyweights. A look at the lineups shows that the giant sucking sound heard in Orlando earlier this year was the heavyweight team pulling lightweights into their boats (as noted earlier by a reader). I certainly hope the UCF lights aren't about to be Villanovaed (Villanova won the lightweight national championship in 1998, focused on heavies shortly thereafter, and has never impacted the national scene in either category again). It looks like most of the lightweights were in boats other than the V8, which makes a casual observer wonder if they're there mainly to fill out seats for seat racing. (I know, those rowers are capable of making the boat, and one or two no doubt will, but...) I wonder what Coach Derrick could do if he was able to make use of every lightweight on the UCF team for an entire season. Could he win a national championship?
5 comments:
The Rollins V4 was open not lightweight.
Yeah but if you look at the V8, they lost all of their pieces. The JV8 had three lightweights in it, and they won 4/4 pieces. The varsity 4 had 3 out of 4 lightweights in the boat, and won 3 out of 4 pieces.
Trying to find some correlation between the number of lights in a boat that won is all but pointless. I think people are forgetting that it takes all 8 rowers - whether they are heavy or light - to make up a boat. No matter what weight a rower is, it doesn't just come down to who has the lowest boat split average, but which group of rowers work the best together.
Biggest offenders: coaches.
the thing you are all forgetting is that it's the heavyweight program that is the funded program so they can pull up any rower they want and if i'm not mistaken, all the lightweights that moved to heavyweight made the choice themselves
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