Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Is Oklahoma OK?


As a reader pointed out, Tulsa is absent from the light four event at Knecht. You may recall that Tulsa had an excellent row at the Head of the Charles (as evidenced by its fall season number four ranking) and I for one was looking forward to seeing how they would make out this spring. As a result, I wrote to Coach Kevin Harris to see what happened. Coach Harris responded by saying that the crew has suffered injury and sickness and is done for the year (didn't this happen to Pitt last year? [Update: see comments; I should've remembered this.]). He's clearly disappointed as is the crew. As a varsity program that is giving some attention to lightweights, I was pulling for the Golden Hurricane to have a successful spring. We shouldn't get too worried though, as Coach Harris goes on to say:

[W]e are still working hard to promote lightweight rowing at TU and I expect that we will be back with a more solid team next year. We'll be looking, with envy, at all of our lightweight colleagues races this spring! We wish we could be there.


In more news from Oklahoma, I see that Oklahoma City University is adding sculling to its program. This is the men's program but FITD readers know that I'm a big proponent of sculling and this is a good step. [Update: See comments - OCU is also recruiting lightweight women scullers!] There are problems that go along with it, of course, beginning with finding opponents. Nonetheless, I applaud the move. Isn't it funny that some of the freshest thinking is coming from Oklahoma (e.g. night racing), a place until recently viewed as a rowing backwater? Heck, we even have a pretty good lightweight team there!

I'd love to see a quad take over from the four, but again, there are some logistical problems with that. The next time I get on a conference call with FISA and the IOC, I've got the new Olympic program for them - only the fastest boats in each class (i.e. 8+, 4x, 2x, 1x), and both sexes and weight classes in each boat class except eights, which will only have heavyweight men and women. That would result in more international participation (because there are more lightweights) while cutting the total number of rowers by two (an IOC goal). It would be more exciting (faster boats) and more inclusive. Hmmm, maybe I should send that idea to the NCAA too.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

The new OCU sculling program is not just for men but also will include women scullers. For some reason, the press release didn't make it to the OCU Women's Rowing web page. In addition, OCU is recruiting women scullers who are lightweights. It's a great, unique opportunity for lightweight women's sculling!

Anonymous said...

Unrelated to this post, but the cMax rankings are out (including one for lt women): http://www.row2k.com/polls/files/cMaxWV804102007.xls

The list is a little incomplete still: no radcliffe, mit, wisco, bucknell, georgetown...
But interesting nonetheless.

Anonymous said...

Last years Pitt boat didn't suffer through injuries and sickness and call it quits for the year. They won Murphy Cup. Then had a bad race at Knecht Cup due to some circumstances that were beyond their control (the weather and floating starts had a lot to do with it) but rebounded to come in second at Dad Vails. I wouldn't exactly say that calling it quits.

Anonymous said...

everyone was in the same circumstances at knecht cup...

Anonymous said...

Excuses are like cell phones, everyone's got one nowadays. Except those rich kids in their private schools driving their fancy cars. They've got two.

Anonymous said...

The point wasn't that Pitt did poorly at Knecht, no matter the reason, it was that they continued to row the boat throughout the year and ended with a decent result.

Anonymous said...

same circumstances true, except the pitt boat was pointed into the shoreline and the officials started the race anyway even though the coxswain's hand was up. If it wasn't for the bad weather conditions they would ahve restarted the race however the officials just didn't care.

Anonymous said...

the boat should not have started the race if they weren't ready to go. Coxing 101.