Monday, April 16, 2007

Wingnuts and Washers - Links From the Weekend

To round out the weekend's racing, here are some links to school pressers:

Starting in California, Stanford has a release on both Saturday's races and Sunday's. Princeton's own release on Windermere is here. UCF's Saturday release is here and Sunday's release is here. LMU's release is here. It's never good when a release starts off, "Lions Gain Experience..." but I think LMU is an improving team. Their losses were worse last year (except to Stanford who was having a bad year) and they have a victory over a pretty decent Long Beach State boat. I'm not sure what LMU's plans are, but they've been racing a light eight pretty regularly over the last few years, are getting faster, and can become another consistent, high quality lightweight program on the West Coast to complement Stanford and Cal. By the same token, as a young crew that watched its 2006 veterans get sucked into the heavyweight squad, UCF should be pleased with their victory over LMU.

Moving to the Knecht Cup, Wisconsin's release is here (I would've sworn it said something a bit different earlier in the day), and Radcliffe's is here, with a much more interesting Crimson article here. The article points out something I missed - Radcliffe's V8 raced in the heavyweight event as well as the lightweight event. With the regatta compressed into one day, although I don't recall the timing of the races, this had to affect the Black and White's performance. The article also reveals that Radcliffe is doing a lot of experimenting, both with lineups as well as with training techniques. This all makes me think that Radcliffe has another card to play, with the deal likely coming on April 28th. Dayton's Knecht presser is here, and reveals that several members of the light eight also raced in the heavyweight 2V race just before the light eight heat.

Finally, I come back to the MIT-UMass race. From readers' comments it sounds like the race took place under some terrible conditions, but that the results are correct. As a result, we need to get the UMass lights into the rankings. MIT can't have been happy with their race, but they'll get a chance for redemption, even if it's not against UMass. Speaking of which, hopefully we'll see that UMass boat race next week at A10s and I hope Coach Dietz is thinking about IRAs.

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