Crew Takes to Red Top For Pre-Yale Tuneup

For something more than two weeks a year, a small estate on the Thames River, just above New London, Connecticut, is busier than the bar at a class reunion. Here, in complete seclusion, two dozen Harvardmen devote their waking hours to the achieving of the one supremely traditional object of Crimson sports: beating Yale in the four-mile crew race late in June.

The accomplishing of this habitual task involves the expenditure of hundreds of man-hours on the river, stacks of boofstcak and other equally delectable viands, long sessions among the brains of the squad--the Messrs. Bolles, Love, Haines--and a good deal of sleep, eating, and varied recreation for the oarsmen. Managers get their fun from personally welcoming every yacht that arrives on the river to celebrate the regatta.

Behind this picture lie many decades of experimentation with training quarters and procedures for the annual grind, longest crew race in the world. Although the crew rows distances up to on miles a day in practice, all the season's regular races are sprints, with lengths ranging from the Henley distance of one and five-sixteenths miles--"leave it to the British to pick such an unorthodox distance" says Bill Bingham--through the mile-and-three-quarters, two-mile, and 2000 meter courses.

The New London regatta requires a complete readaptation of the spring's techniques to enable the crew to keep up a winning pace over a distance twice that of other races. This year will bring additional problems in the form of Olympic Trials five days after New London and a resuling urgency in reducing the rowing distance again.

The physical set-up at the Connecticut training camp is of comparatively recent inception, being the result of a 1929 decision by a group of "Old Blues" who felt that the old buildings were inadequate. Now a string of white shingled structures--three dwellings, a dinning hall, and a boathouse--grace the secluded slopes less than a mile south of Yale's head-quarters at Gale's Ferry.

Harvard crews have been training at Red Top for far longer than the twenty years since the rebuilding. The first time a shell-load of oarsmen appeared in that vicinity was in 1881, when one building housed all the members of the expedition.

Robert F. Herrick '90, considered by Crimson rowing enthusiasts the patron saint of our crews, got his first glimpse of the place in June, 1887, when the steamer brought him and his Freshman crewmates up the Thames to the landing. Herrick puts into words a feeling which still pervades the locale:

"The thrill of this first sight of Red Top still persists and is felt by everyone who has been fortunate enough to get there, including not only the crew squads but the managers and waiters, all undergraduates. There is the companionship and devotion to the cause so characteristic of crew rowing everywhere, which comes to its full strength at Red Top."

1948 Has its Own Problems

There is more than the usual psychological pressure this year. This fact has been beaten into the ground by almost every sportswriter in the United States, but a few details have fallen into place in the last couple of weeks to make things even more intensive than before.

First, the Olympic trials have been shifted from the muddy and treacherous Schuylkill River to the more equable waters of Lake Carnegie at Princeton. This change, which comes after lengthy controversy between college coaches and the club-dominated Olympic Rowing Committee, will eliminate the unfairnesses which the currents and silt of Philadelphia impose on the course there.

The defeat of Cornell last week by Navy also throws certain previous conceptions far out the window. Washington and Cornell had seemed the only boats that might really stand a chance to dump the Crimson in the trials; now Navy, which finished a comfortable distance in arrears at the Regatta on May 8, looks like a tough opponent.

The next fortnight will be important mainly in convincing a very good crew that it must work to beat a very game Yale beat. That is where Red Top, with its reminders of Spike Chace and Bob Herrick and of Leverett Saltonstall's 1914 Henley winners, can play a part.