SEASON RECAP: Successful Season Culminates at IRAs

It all seemed to have been for naught. After a season in which they went 6-1 in dual racing, the Harvard men’s varsity lightweight boat somehow placed fifth at Eastern Sprints after a race in which they had been seeded first. It was disappointing, to say the least.

But then came last weekend, and the Intercollegiate Rowing Championships, and suddenly the Crimson lightweights showed their true colors again. The varsity eight raced to a second-place finish in the varsity race behind a strong Cornell team.

The Big Red proved to be the Crimson’s nemesis all season. Harvard’s lone dual-racing loss was to Cornell in the first meet of the spring. The team tallied mostly second-place finishes, with Penn in third, coupled with a victory from the second freshman boat.

But at the same time, most of the losses were by very narrow margins against the defending national champion Big Red crew. As a result, the team was upbeat about the rest of the season.

“There are definitely things to change and to improve, but considering the way first races go, we did really well,” varsity coxswain Mark Adomanis said after the Cornell race.

The next week’s performance against Dartmouth and MIT was an almost exact turnaround of the results against the Big Red, with four boats taking top places in the morning’s races in Hanover.

The boats focused more on their speed off the line, which resulted in wins by the varsity, second varsity, varsity four, and second freshman boats. The freshman eight was not far behind the winning Big Green oarsmen, only 1.8 seconds away from a victory and a clean sweep of the day’s races.

Next up, the Crimson hoped to erase the memories of a painful 2006 loss to Navy.

“Navy’s always hard, but we’ll have a good advantage because we’ll be on our home turf,” said second varsity coxswain Kevin He before the race. “We’re strong and work well together, and in the end, it all comes down to determination.”

Harvard defeated the Midshipmen and brought the Haines Cup back to Cambridge as a result of tense wins posted by the varsity and second varsity eights.

It was more of the same the next week against Princeton and Yale in New Jersey.

The Crimson once again proved its mettle, recovering from a day dominated by Yale to pull out a first-place finish in the varsity race that gave them not only the Goldthwait Cup, awarded to the best varsity boat, but also gave the crew the Vogel Cup as the best overall team.

Due to a Cornell loss to Dartmouth, the Harvard varsity’s 6-1 record meant that they entered the end-of-year Sprints competition ranked first in EARC polls.

But the team members were cautious about the seeding’s implications.

“We’re coming into it ranked first, but the number doesn’t mean anything—if anything, it means people will be gunning for you a bit more,” Adomanis said at the time. “We’re expecting it to be a real dogfight, and we’re just focusing on staying aggressive. A lot of it is making sure you bring the right attitude.”

However, on the day, despite what appeared undeniably to be “the right attitude,” the varsity boat placed a puzzling fifth in its Grand Final race, with a time that was actually over a second slower than the one it posted in its qualifying heat.

“We were able to hold it somewhat level for a while,” varsity three-seat Brian Aldrich said afterwards. “It felt like a good piece. But then every time you looked over the rest of the field was just moving on us. We didn’t know what was happening—it felt strong.”

Three out of four other boats also qualified for their Grand Finals, though only the second freshman eight took first, with the second and third varsities taking fifth and sixth, respectively.

The members of the team, though, said that they would not let the day’s unexpected losses affect their performance in the IRAs, the biggest contest of the season, which were due up next.

“We have one more chance to get it right,” Adomanis said. “We’re not going to let this determine our identity as a crew—we know we can do better.”

And they did, sending an uncoxed four and a freshman four to the Grand Finals of the IRAs, both of which placed sixth.

The varsity boat, on the other hand, pulled itself into silver after a very tight race against Georgetown and Cornell, finishing just a second behind the victorious Big Red.

“It is a bittersweet way to end,” said Adomanis, who is a member of the Crimson editorial board. “Every kid, when they show up to college to be a rower, envisions themselves on the winner’s dock. But it was a good year and it was a fun year. We had a lot of chemistry together.”

—Staff writer Alexandra C. Bell can be reached at acbell@fas.harvard.edu.