The San Diego Crew Classic is making their new Friday start a habit, and the regatta has swelled to fill the extra racing-room. The first races came down the course and along the beach a half-hour earlier this year, and with that, the party--and the weekend--was on.
For as serious as the racing can get at the Crew Classic--and there is a looming showdown between the #3 Women of Washington and #4 Texas on the horizon in the Jessop-Whittier Cup--this is a regatta where having some fun while doing your wet-launching and enjoying what is, for most teams, one of the first big road trips of the year, means you take a lot in stride.
On Friday, that even included laughing off a bit of rain before the sun came out for the racing: the Washington women joked on their Instagram story that they brought some Seattle weather with them, but luckily also brought plenty of Husky rain gear from home, too.
The sun broke through in time to get the racing going, and on the whole we saw plenty of folks excited to have made it to San Diego and the start of the racing season--to include a few obligatory "we made it to the beach" posts and poses:
Inviting ACRA
The last races of the Friday saw a new event come down the Bay: the ACRA Invitational. It was designed to encourage ACRA club teams to make the trip by giving them a chance to race an ACRA-only final on the first day before doubling up into the weekend's collegiate events where they can mix it up with varsity programs.
"Having a Friday race was nice," said UCLA 4 seat Toby Gajar, after his crew took the win in the men's race. "Now I can go into the rest of the weekend having already raced the course once."
While not every ACRA team making the trip took the regatta up on the offer, preferring to stay focused on the Saturday-Sunday racing, the ACRA-only fixtures proved exciting: UCLA, the 2023 ACRA champ, walked away with the men's race while UC Santa Barbara and Orange Coast served up the best nail-biter of the whole session--going bowball-to-bowball all the way down the beach--to end the day.
Here's that UCSB-OCC battle, which to be honest, might be hard to top in both the number of lead changes and close finish department for the rest of the weekend. We won't spoil it for you, though you can skip right to the result here if you must, but it is worth a watch--and well-rowed to both crews for sure.
The replay of the men's race gives you some idea of the challenges the crosswind provided today, and how it turned the regatta into a bit of a coxswains race. You really had to know how to crab-walk your way down the course today, whew, and we saw at least one crew that needed to be pulled back onto their stakeboat by a launch in the crosswind.
Afterwards, UCLA coxswain Maddy Dufour, talked about the conditions.
"An important lesson that I’ve learned throughout my rowing career is that winning is less about achieving perfection, and more often about the ability to overcome. Today, our ability to come together despite the conditions and put in our all, regardless of how ugly it might have been, is the reason we were able to have the success that we did.
"My coach has said before that there is no perfect stroke. There is a perfect rhythm. Coming off of the water today, I can say for sure that we did not have a perfect rhythm. Far from it. But, we had the rhythm that was required to take home the gold. And, at the end of the day, that’s all that matters."
UCLA's weekend continues in the Cal Cup racing, where they will see Gonzaga's varsity program and fellow ACRA teams USC and UC Long Beach in the third of the four heats on Saturday. That next set of races was already on Dufour's mind:
"Some might call our race a win, but to me a win is something that happens at the end. Our team is only just starting to come together, and today was a stepping stone to much larger aspirations we have for the rest of the season. I may not know exactly where we’ll end up, but I know that today, as well as this weekend, is bringing us one step closer to getting there."
When the Crew Classic motto says "The Rowing Season Starts Here" that is exactly what they are talking about, and we can't wait to watch those next steps get taken out on Mission Bay this weekend.
Masters Takeover
For all the attention that will get paid over the weekend to the big college races and all the youth rowers descending on Mission Bay to lay down an early marker ahead of Youth Nationals, the Crew Classic is also a massive masters event. People don't seem to need much of an excuse to head to Southern California, especially those with eight friends willing to have this kind of fun with them.
"I had a blast," two time Olympic champ Susan Francia told row2k, after winning the first flight of the Mixed Master's Club Eight in the crew pictured up top: Club Nautico De San Juan. She was one of three Olympians in the crew: Michelle Zaloom, who has been to two Olympics as well, held down the bow, while Croatia's Igor Boraska has been to three Summer Games, and also did bobsled at the 2002 Games.
Francia called the conditions "the typical slight cross wind" but added: "it doesn’t matter when the sun's out and you’re there to have a good time."
"I loved heckling by the crews at the start. Thats also part of the fun. We have to pull harder to back it up! But we had a great time and raced some fast crews."
Those fast crews take their master's races pretty seriously as well: these guys had a video set-up worth of The Boat Race, even though they were on Mission Bay and not the Tideway.
And those guys weren't the only ones either with high tech add-ons, either.
Quads for Days
For folks with fewer that eight friends, or just a preference for sculling, the Masters Club Quad event introduced last year has proved a hit. Crew Classic Executive Director Bobbie Smith called the event "one of our most popular races" in speaking with row2k a year ago, even when it was new to the program--and this year, she had to add heats to accommodate all the scullers who wanted to race the quad.
In all, 14 women's quads and 15 men's quads hit the course, enough for two heats of each to run on Friday, and those events will be the only A Finals on Saturday, eight quads across. The heat winners on the women's side were San Diego Rowing Club and Steeringuwright, LLC, while Texas RC and Wyandotte nabbed the top spots in the men's heats. Those finals, and the B final for each, will be the last races of the day on Saturday.
You can check the full results here and here are the streaming links for the weekend, either to catch races live or to watch replays:
If you don't have all day to watch every race, here are local times for some of the key heats on Saturday:
row2k will be posting galleries and reports throughout the weekend, so keep checking back.
Notes from the Course
Referee Heaven - the Crew Classic is such a well-oiled machine that we have heard it described in the past by referees as heavenly, the Promised Land of regattas. Case in point on organization: the race number/lane number stickers on the side of every boat, color-coded to your heat.
Not only do they make marshaling a breeze, even in the breeze, but over the years they have also become a cool "souvenir" to leave on the side of your shell, just to prove you were here.
Drone vs Seagull - we spotted a close call early in the afternoon, when a rogue seagull nearly took out the drone. With another 114 races to go, and a whole lot of seagulls to dodge, here's hoping the drone stays lucky, and keeps delivering great video.
"So, We'll See You Tomorrow" - well, that's it for the appetizers, so, yep, time for tomorrow, and no one is more ready than the WSU coxswains:
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