Amazing!

It has been a really incredible couple of days as our regular decision recruits are emailing, calling, and getting in contact about their acceptances to the College - the excitement is really palpable and I think we'll have some tremendous potential and youth added to our program. As matriculation cards are sent back I can begin to write about the new members of our team for next year.

Also, an excellent practice today with a good mixture of technical and physical rowing (they should always be mixed in my mind...) - I think I can continue to do an even better job of defining the precise elements of the stroke cycle that will unlock some of the "easy speed" that we haven't yet found. The physicality of our rowers makes it a little bit more challenging to find a collective impulse because both the negative and positive aspects of each rower's contribution to boat speed is magnified. What a wonderful puzzle...

Trailer Departure

Trailer loaded and ready to depart...We'll see you in Philadelphia and Princeton.

Keep the streak alive

Wanted to fire off a quick blog post "twitter" style - leaving the boathouse now after fixing our tent and putting the team through their paces. We needed a course correction in terms of what is important to the group and I think it played out in both of our varsity boats having improved practices. Loading tomorrow morning and then heading down to Princeton to drop off the boats for the men's team and then heading to Philadelphia and the Murphy Cup.

More from the road tomorrow!

Interesting Meeting This Afternoon

Had a great discussion this afternoon over lunch (Subway...does anyone else notice how pungent the smell of the "fresh" bread is?) with our faculty liaisons and senior faculty members and coaches. The topics ranged from how we can better educate and involve the faculty in the mission at Trinity to create excellence, to recruiting, to real forums where faculty and coaches can interact and share ideas. Essentially, it seems that many faculty are envious of the relationships we are able to generate with our recruits and current athletes - whereas we know almost as much about the incoming class as admissions many professors will enter a class in September and have no background information whatsoever about their class roster. What kind of campus community could we have if there were personal expectations of excellence in the academic and athletic realm before setting foot on campus. It's one thing to expect to earn good grades or produce excellent work (those two are not necessarily the same beast) because of your own personal drive and initiative or parental expectations and quite another for your teacher or coach to want to help you reach your potential (or exceed what you think may be your potential).

Just one way...

Solid practice into another blowing headwind...solid work portion of the practice that surprised everyone I think followed by an aggressive post-row exercise that showed a ton of progress again. One of the men's rowers commented on how it was easily "the loudest post-row of all time"...that can't be too bad right? It made me think about what, as a team, we choose to value and how we can continue to emphasize the things that are important to us day in and day out while maintaining the flexibility to respond to needed situations. Very much looking forward to Philadelphia to see what we are doing well and what we need to work on compared to our competition. Racing is only four days away now!

Also, there's a part of the movie City Slickers with Billy Crystal and Jack Palance where they discuss the meaning of life...and how it's just one thing...does anybody else remember that scene?

This is more like it

Ahh...true New England rowing conditions...20 mph headwinds, white caps, ice forming in the tracks and on the oarlocks, rowers attacking the work with gusto. I love it!

This is what I had expected for spring training and instead we had southern Georgia conditions on the Connecticut River. Either way, the work was sharp and intense today and I think we made good progress in continuing to develop our practice habits.

If you look closely in the picture above you can see our two crews battling side by side doing starts.

Spring Training Complete

The athletes have a well-deserved Saturday afternoon and Sunday off before we return to practice on Monday...with the intent to make our boats even faster in preparation for the Murphy Cup next Saturday. The skill level across the board has been improved and we'll have to see if we can match that with our physicality over the distance. It certainly hasn't hurt us to have 7 of the 8 days be virtually glass water to make discoveries, improvements, and to improve our practice skills. Special thanks to all those who helped make the week fun and enjoyable and hope that we can keep the enthusiasm running high as we continue our search for speed.

Spring Training Finishing Up

3/20/09 - We're finishing up spring training here in New England's Rising Star and we've been blessed with excellent weather. We've explored a lot of different lineups in the search for speed and have made some good breakthroughs...Technically we're continuing to work on how to find easy speed and flow while being comfortable in the shell. Needless to say, the boats look farther along then they did at this time last year and that's encouraging.

I'll try and post some videos and pictures from the previous month in the next bit. Looking forward to keeping you all better updated as we prepare for the Murphy Cup in Philadelphia next Saturday.