Every Cornell rower hit the water on Saturday morning at the annual Schwartz Cup, one of the many reasons that the tradition is so special to the rowing program.

On the women’s side, the junior/senior lineup won the race. The lightweight men’s race was taken by the sophomore crew, flashing its potential for the future. In the heavyweight race, the seniors took advantage of their experience to claim the win. The Schwartz Cup awarded for best skit went to the sophomore heavyweights for their parody of the story of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. The wolf was played by sophomore Jim Voter, imitating heavyweight coach Todd Kennett ’91. The event, however, is as much about the tradition as it is the competition.

“It’s one of the most historic races that Cornell crews have,” said heavyweight commodore Chris Frendl, a senior. “It’s the only race that every member of the Cornell crew races in. Everybody gets to race, so it’s the one race that unifies us as a whole team and embodies the Cornell spirit and tradition of rowing.”

As much tradition as there is behind the event, it carried a light-hearted overtone. The freshman women’s boat wore the colors of the rainbow and one coxswain was sporting a banana outfit.

"Schwartz Cup is always an exciting, fun, different kind of race environment than we have throughout the year," said senior captain Harlan Trevithick, whose crew wore all black "to intimidate," she said jokingly.

The women's team also held a small ceremony honoring the 1989 national championship crew, the only women's crew to win a national title for Cornell. The 1989 varsity-8 and novice-4 boats each won their respective national championship, and Cornell also claimed the Sprauge Cup, awarded to the team with the most points at the championship. After the race was over on Saturday, the current women's team had lunch with their predecessors. The women bonded over traditions that have lasted the 20 years since the championship squad, according to Trevithick, and the alumnae offered bits of advice to the current undergraduates.

"They just told us about their experience," Trevithick said. "You have to make the experience your own, they can only say so much about how to win a national championship. Take advantage of everything."

One new wrinkle to this year's event was the introduction of a 500-meter sprint race, a crowd-pleasing addition that was lightweight coach Chris Kerber's (alumni?) idea, according to Frendl. The result times from the sprint were weighted and combined with the times of the traditional 5-k race to determine the winners. Every crew was in close competition in the sprint race; Kerber said the slowest men's time was around 1:26 and the fastest was about 1:20.

"We had two [crews] within just a few seconds of each other and that's just showing good potential for the entire team," Kerber said.

"It was a great success, a complete crowd-pleaser like it was supposed to be," Frendl said.

Although not an official race, coaches and team leaders got a sneak peek at the speed of the crews in a competition for the first time.

"We have some really strong girls that have a lot of potential," Trevithick said. "Once we combine sophomores through seniors for [next weekend's Poughkeepsie Invitaitonal], I think we're going to move pretty fast."

"The true tests will come in the next couple of weeks at the Head of Charles and Princeton Chase," Kerber said. "We still have quite a bit of training and identifying top athletes at this time."