Inexperience Stops Harvard from Continuing to Grand Final

This season has been one of learning and building for the Harvard lightweight crew team. The varsity eight won just two dual races this season—against Penn and MIT—and failed to make the Grand Final at Eastern Sprints for the first time in the history of the competition.

“I think [Sprints] was a really disappointing finish to the season for all our boats, because it was a little bit worse than what we wanted to do,” junior coxswain Kevin He said. “We had a lot of sophomores, and we put a lot of work into these guys, and even though we didn’t win as many races as we wanted to...we set up a really strong base for next year.”

After losing six seniors to graduation last year, the Crimson returned just two members of its varsity eight, senior Matt Young and junior Jeff Overington. This season’s young lineup is composed of six sophomores, two juniors, and just one senior.

“If you compare [our team with] other teams in the league, we’re astonishingly young,” He said. “Our guys are strong, but you just can’t beat experience. If two people have the same erg score, but another person has raced more, then the one with more experience has the upper hand.”

Unfortunately for Harvard, the youth and inexperience of the varsity squad cost the team precious dual race wins. In its first race of the season, the Crimson came in second to Cornell, the defending national champion. The Big Red took advantage of its familiarity with its turn-laden course on Lake Cayuga to systematically increase its lead. The Crimson finished 4.4 seconds behind Cornell and 6.2 seconds ahead of Penn with a time of 5:51.3.

“The first race against Cornell is usually pretty big because Cornell’s a really fast crew because they won sprints this year and last,” He said. “The first race is always a really good gauge for how we are against the other boats. We were five seconds behind them and we thought five seconds isn’t that much because that time can be made up if we just go a little bit faster over each stroke.”

And Harvard did indeed achieve more length per stroke as it finished just .05 seconds behind Dartmouth the following Saturday at its first race of the season on the Charles. For the second time in three years, the Crimson was forced to relinquish the Biglin Bowl to the Big Green.

The Harvard varsity eight finished a close third behind Navy and Georgetown in the race for the Haines Cup. Although the crew battled to take the lead halfway through the race, strong sprints from the Midshipmen and the Hoyas around the 1500-meter mark caused the Crimson to fall into third place by the time the boats came across the finish line.

In its last race before Eastern Sprints, Harvard again came in third place, this time behind Ivy League foes Yale and Princeton. The Tigers were awarded the Goldthwait Cup for winning the varsity race, while the Bulldogs won the Vogel Cup for their strong team performance. The Crimson came away from the day empty-handed after finishing 10.3 seconds behind Princeton and 7.5 seconds behind Yale despite staying with the field for the first 700 meters.

“We knew coming in that Yale and Princeton are ranked one and two in the country,” senior five-seat Matt Young said after the race. “Even so, we thought we had good chances of doing well, but the final margin was definitely kind of disappointing.”

The freshmen crews proved to be the high points for Harvard in the HYP race. The freshman eight finished just 1.9 seconds behind its New Haven counterpart, the closest any crew had come to Yale at the time. The second freshman eight won its race by almost 15 seconds.

“The freshmen have been extremely exciting this year,” second varsity coxswain Dexter Louie said after the HYP race. “They’re going to add a lot to the team when they come up to the varsity ranks next year.”

Despite its strong performances throughout the season, the freshman eight finished fourth in its heat at Eastern Sprints, landing the crew a place in the Petite Final, which the crew ended up winning, taking seventh place overall. The second freshman eight was awarded the bronze medal after finishing behind Navy and Cornell in its Grand Final.

Both the varsity eight and JV eight took fourth in their opening heats. The varsity crew ended up taking second behind Navy in the Petite Final, battling Penn and MIT for the silver, while the JV eight won its Petite Final.

“We would obviously have liked to do better, but I think it’s unfair to chalk up a whole season’s worth of work into one six-minute piece,” captain and second varsity seven-seat Pat Mulcahy said. “There’s a hole lot more that goes into it.”

The Harvard lightweights will next take to the water in the IRA National Championships to be held June 5-7 in Camden, N.J. There, the Crimson crews will have a shot at redemption when they take on the teams that they have raced throughout the season and at Eastern Sprints.

—Staff writer Lucy D. Chen can be reached at lucychen@fas.harvard.edu.