Sunday, April 01, 2007

Crew Classic

At the Crew Classic in San Diego, Stanford easily (36 seconds) outdistanced the competition, Chapman and Arizona State. While I missed the final, I saw the preliminary (raced for lane placement), which had a similar result. Stanford easily controlled the race, with open water by the 1000. Stanford looked impressive - their catches were clean, crisp, and together, length looked good, and the bodies were together. Chapman and Arizona State are new names on the lightweight circuit, and had nice races with each other. Time will tell if these crews will be consistent lightweight racers or if they just put out boats of opportunity, but it would always be nice to see them stick around.

It's unfortunate, and I'm sure Stanford shares this opinion too, that LMU and Cal had to scratch from this event. I think both of these crews are getting faster and could have given Stanford a good race. No matter though, because we'll see all three in a few weeks at Windermere.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am surprised you haven't commented on Ed adding LW Women's Rowing to the list of submittable results. This is a very large acknowledgement of women's LW rowing imho.

JW Burk said...

Yes, you're probably right about that. I had focused on the fact that there is "EARC HW Men," "EARC LW Men," but "EAWRC Women and LW Women." (Almost as if LW Women aren't actually women.)

To be quite honest, ever since Ed refused to list me as a new site almost 2 years ago (I'm one of those horrible bloggers, you know), followed by his refusal to ever change his "the dam wasn't open" statement, I've haven't tracked row2k as closely as I used to. He does have a monopoly on results, but there is so much more that could be done there. When the Web first became popular, rowing led the way with its use of technology. Now, however, we're an also ran. Almost no blogs cover rowing exclusively, results are haphazardly reported, photos aren't shared or freely available (of course I tried to do that and people asked me to stop!), there are really no online communities of rowers.

Sorry, that was a tangent. Ed has walled himself off a bit from the "unofficial" online rowing community by refusing to link and refusing to supply RSS feeds. I'm a bit puzzled as to why, but that's just the way it is. You're right though, it is nice to see that lightweights can be listed separately and I'll try to remember to note that at some point.