Rowers Looking to Bounce Back This Week

Both the men’s heavyweight and lightweight rowing teams are looking to bounce back after tough races last weekend, while the women are trying to keep their momentum after defeating Penn and Rutgers for the Class of ’89 Points Plate.
The men’s heavyweight squad will travel to Princeton, Pa., and New Brunswick, N.J. to race twice on the road in the same weekend for the first time this season since the Pac-10 Invitational.
“We’ve done a lot of race preparation for the week,” said senior Andrew Carr. “This weekend we have back-to-back dual meets and will have another opportunity to show the strength and depth of our team.”
First, the team will compete in the Princeton-hosted dual meet with Yale and will then race against a strong Rutgers squad on the following day.
The Red is coming off a disappointing dual meet, which saw the varsity-8 boat lose to both Syracuse and Navy.[img_assist|nid=30221|title=All together now|desc=The women’s crew has momentum from its Class of ‘89 Points Plate win last weekend.|link=node|align=left|width=|height=0]
“We want to make sure we go into this race with the right attitude,” said senior heavyweight captain Dan Holodnik. “Last week, we thought we might have an easier time with Navy and Syracuse. We knew that the teams had speed, but we thought we were faster. There is a little more cautiousness going into this race. We know that Yale and Princeton have deep crews and it will be interesting to see what happens. We’re trying to go in confident and well rested.”
The Red has put in hours of practice time this week trying to work on its speed and improve for the upcoming week, as well as the rest of the season.
“We want to continually seek out speed through two methods,” Carr said. “Get more easy boat speed by rowing better together and there’s no substitute for good old fashioned hard pulling.”
The men’s lightweight team is also coming off a disappointing weekend, which saw its varsity-8 boat lose to both Princeton and Yale in competitive races.
“Last weekend was definitely a big disappointment, but we’re looking to bounce back this week,” Kochem said. “As long as we perform up to our potential then we’ll do really well.”
Cornell will compete in a Columbia-hosted dual meet with MIT.
Going into the race last weekend, the Red was the No. 1 lightweight team nationally, but its ranking slipped after losing to Princeton and Yale. The team feels that it underperformed in both races and now wants a shot to show its full potential against Columbia and MIT this weekend in New York.
“Conditions last week were really extreme, and we didn’t keep our composure as well as we would have liked,” said senior Matt Kochem. “We’ve definitely learned from our mistakes and now we’re looking to improve.”
Meanwhile, the women have all the momentum they need heading into their dual meet with Brown and Columbia.
Last week, the team won the Class of ’89 Points Plate for its overall performance in the dual meet against Penn and Rutgers.
The Red’s varsity-8 boat lost the first race of the day, but then the women bounced back to win four of the next five races behind the strength of wins from the second varsity-8, both third varsity-4 boats and the novice-8 boat.
The team will need to use its momentum as it will have its hands full with a very strong Brown team whose second varsity-8, novice-8 and third varsity-4 boats are all ranked No. 1 in their flight.