The Search for Perfection: A New Technique Keyed National Champs

This past summer, while Harvard students gamboled at home with friends and freshmen eagerly devoured their QRR study materials, the Harvard men's lightweight crew reached the pinnacle of the college racing world by winning the national championships in Camden, N.J. in June.

Big stuff, recapturing the title the lightweights held once before in 1991 and lost in 1992. But the road to this championship actually started nine months before--in the Czech Republic.

The World Championships

At the 1993 World Championships in Roudnice, Czech Republic, Harvard lightweight Coach Charlie Butt co-coached the national four with coxswain heavyweight crew alongside renowned coach Mike Spracklin.

In a sport in which wins and losses depend as much on trigonometry and physics as brute strength and coordination, Spracklin, according to Butt, refined Butt's understanding of a rowing technique that would make Harvard's season extraordinary.

Spracklin taught Butt an approach to familiarizing his crew with the stroke which maximized the work done by the oar blade in the water based on this principle: If a blade is forced into the water hard enough, Spracklin said, a mound of water forms in front of the blade that exerts a backwards force on the blade and thereby holds it firmly in the water.

This results in more of the work done by the rower going into the motion of the boat rather than into dragging the blade through the water. The actual result is speed.

"He got a specific way to row from Spracklin," senior Sam Truslow said. "It was a great new stroke."

But Butt said that he just took a different educational tack, using physics to give the crew a better understanding of how an efficient stroke worked.

"This was a good approach for the group of people we had," Butt said. "It resulted in a better understanding of the stroke for the crew."

Disappointing Start

Bow to stern last year, the boat was comprised of senior Chris McGarry, junior Field Ogden, senior jeremy Barnum, senior Nathan Hunt, Charlie Braun '93, captain John Roberts, Piotr Sobieszczyk '93, Truslow and coxswain John Ma '93.

Trying to incorporate the new stroke technique, the lightweights began their season somewhat disappointingly--coming in second to Yale at the Head of the Carnegie regatta.

The team rebounded well, however. In its fall race with the Boston Rowing Center (one of the best rowing clubs in the country), the Crimson remained surprisingly competitive.

Working with videotapes of the races, Butt scrutinized every detail of his crew, from the bladework and body position of his rowers to facial expressions--and discovered a technical flaw: at the catch, the stern of the boat was sinking below the water.

"He's one of the best in the business," senior Jeremy Barnum said.

Thus, as the winter training season approached, the team had two main goals: master the new stroke and correct the flaw in their catch. The team trained extremely hard, with many double practices, but mastering it proved to be difficult.

"The team worked hard to find this stroke," Butt said. Senior Sam Truslow said it took him half the year to perfect the stroke, and even then only after double practices four times per week through the spring and summer. But it was the eventual perfection of this stroke that would define the season.

Uncooperative Nature

As spring approached, Mother Nature proved uncooperative. Bad weather kept the team off the water well into spring. In fact, the crew set its final lineup just days before its first race in late April, the San Diego Crew Classic. There, the Crimson came in second to Penn.

Three weeks later, Harvard rebounded for a victory in the Harvard-Yale-Princeton regatta. But the crew suffered a disappointing defeat at the Eastern Sprints, where they came in second to a surprising Dartmouth despite cutting nearly three seconds off the Big Green lead in the last 600 meters of the race.

"We knew we had enough speed to beat Dartmouth," Barnum said. "We just had a bad day at Sprints. We were not broken by that defeat."

Harvard regrouped in the weeks leading up to the national championships in Camden (the normal national championship course in Syracuse was flooded) by focusing on precision and speed.

At Camden

When the team got to Camden on that weekend in June, it was clear Mother Nature had finally provided a winner. The lake was small and intimate, with very flat water. It was the kind of course that forces teams to look at and be aware of each other.

Harvard went in fairly relaxed. Still, there were anxious moments. During the weeks between Eastern Sprints and the Nationals, the team had put on some weight--enough to create panic as weigh-ins approached. (Lightweight crews must have an average weight of 155 pounds and no member may weigh more 160.) The team needed to lose weight fast, and breakfasts of Special K weren't going to do the trick.

Butt sent his men out on an especially long "sweat row" to shed the pounds. One rower passed out at the weigh-in, but the mission was accomplished as everyone cleared. The race afterwards seemed easy.

"We moved out great at the start," Barnum said. So well, in fact, that Harvard had a full length lead over second-place Penn at the 1000-meter mark. Harvard's new stroke technique worked to perfection as the crew left its competition in its wake, ending with a whopping six-and-a-half second win.

"It was the ultimate payoff for a really long season of hard work," Barnum said. "Second place was just not good enough for us."