From the first dual races of the collegiate season to the various championships, everything has been about positioning and development for the IRA Championship. There were titles and cups, and traditional duals on the line throughout the spring, and certainly those races were benchmark moments of varying degrees.
Some of the bigger moments included Yale's fifth consecutive varsity eight win at Eastern Sprints; Washington's continued dominance of the Pac-12, and their third consecutive conference championship; Harvard's undefeated varsity eight's dual season with a crew seating four freshmen and the showdown in Worcester.
Among the lightweight men, count the sixth ranked Penn V8 edging top seeded and undefeated Cornell's LV8 out of the Eastern Sprints Grand, and then winning in the least of the six-favored lanes on windy Lake Quinsigamond; or Princeton's HYP dramatic comeback win, a race that saw them drop back by what should have been a fatal distance behind Yale, only to unleash a series of accelerating moves, and then win in the final strokes.
At Sprints, the Yale lights won medals in all five of their races, winning silver in the first, second and third varsity eights. All 41 of their athletes left Worcester with a medal, and together secured the Jope Cup points trophy, their first since 2016, and the fourth in the last eight years.
In the women's lightweight league, Princeton began their dual season losing to Stanford by three seconds, but it was a loss the Tigers judged as a marked improvement from the margin that separated the two squads the previous season, and set Princeton on a path to their first Women's Sprints title since 2011.
For Stanford, the season was another dominant showing that will conclude at Lake Natoma as another national title defense - their fifth in a row. Stanford starts the IRA with four consecutive titles on the wall, and a dual season lined with wins.
The weather for most of the spring was as challenging as any season in a while, wreaking havoc on scheduling, forcing cancellations, and just being mostly wet, cold and windy throughout. But in the racing, the wins and losses provided ultimate entertainment.
But what does it really matter now, with the IRA National Championship Regatta only a few days from beginning?
How will the field of teams view their seasons if they get to the start platforms on Lake Natoma Friday and lay an egg in the opening heats? Or get to the final as a favorite to win and then - well - don't.
The faces of the athletes and coaches will not be able to mask their inner disappointment, and all the highs and lows will become not much more than individual points in a long spring, at least until the next fall comes along and the promise of another year will begin again.
But that is what makes the coming weekend the biggest of deals for the 2019 season.
With that - let's have a look at where everyone stands, how the crews are seeded, and which crews are carrying momentum to Gold River, California.
Heavy Men
Given that there has not been a lot of crossover racing between the West and East, the best place to start looking is the polling. The results are based on wins and losses, but the people doing the voting are the coaches, and it is safe to assume that they have a good idea of who the top crews are going to be.
Yale has been on the top of that list all season, as is fitting. They have gone undefeated since winning their second consecutive IRA last spring. In fact, their only loss in two seasons was to Cal at the 2018 Crew Classic. They have run the table since then, right through last weekend's Sprints when they won everything but the second eight.
It was their fifth Sprints V8 title and their third successive Rowe Cup. While the points total was not lopsided - Harvard tied them in points, but Yale took the Cup with their win in the varsity eight - it was a dominating performance.
If there is any real marker to highlight Yale as being the favorite next weekend in the first varsity eight, it was the way they won at Sprints.
Head coach Steve Gladstone downplayed that the margins between his crew and the rest of the field at the finish, with second place Harvard closest at six seconds back, it does not emphatically mean Yale is that much faster. He points to the conditions in concluding that.
"There were very heavy conditions, headwind conditions, and whenever you have a long race like that, that's going to increase the margins between boats," Gladstone said. "The longer the race, the larger the gap is between the crews. So, to discount Harvard because they were six seconds behind Yale, into a strong head wind, I'm not sure that's an accurate assessment."
Give him that, but then come back to the fact that Yale and Harvard were in the top seeded lanes, and in similar conditions, and by the time the crews had rowed off the line and past the dock in front of the Donahue Rowing Center, the only thing that would have changed the result is a massive Yale crab. And even that might not have done it.
Yale's speed off the line is just plain fast.
Still, Harvard, Brown and Princeton were not slow, rowed hard and fought the distance. Princeton was in medal position for what looked like the first half until Brown came through on the far shore in lane 6. And Gladstone has a fair point when he points to the success of those crews during the dual season, particularly Harvard's.
The Sprints loss was their only one this season. They have a young boat, half of them freshmen, but they are proven freshmen, and not one of them had anything close to a look of resignation standing on the medal dock to accept the silver medals.
"What I would say," Gladstone said summing up the East, "is it appears that there are four crews that I think will be contenders for medals. I think Brown, Princeton, Harvard, Yale - obviously with an edge. But, of those four crews, I would not automatically assume that Cal and Washington are that much faster," Gladstone said.
Which brings us to the West Coast and the Pac-12 schools, particularly Washington and Cal.
Washington has been rolling through their season. They are deep, and fast, and probably not pleased with having to be second in the varsity eight at two IRAs in a row. Winning the Ten Eyck Trophy as the overall points winner for the 11th time in the last 12 years is a big deal - and Washington is leading the season team points totals again right now - but the varsity eight is the championship everyone talks about.
While Cal raced and lost to Yale at this year's San Diego Crew Classic - Yale owned the race from start to finish - that was a while ago and Cal has gotten faster and posted a solid season since.
There is not enough overlap to be certain of who is better, the Sprints teams, or the Pac-12.
Cal and Washington are the favorites out West. But except for the brief one-race dual in San Diego, the top two from the West have not seen the top two from the East.
"Yale is the clear favorite," said Washington coach Michael Callahan. "I think we've handled our business well this season, but we will have to go to the next level to compete. This group has had an unrelenting resiliency throughout the year during practice and training," he said of his team.
"This speaks to the character of the team we have here right now. Also, a West Coast IRA is always fun for our fans and families. Can't wait to get there and do it!"
Lightweight Men
The best way to sum up the lightweight league is to go back to a parting comment Cornell coach Chris Kerber made as he was walking through the parking lot in Worcester not all that long after Penn had won their surprising varsity eight championship - the first Sprints win for the Philadelphia school since 1976.
"The racing in the lightweight sprints league is unbelievable," Kerber remarked to row2k as he was heading to find Navy coach Shawn Bagnall, whose crew had taken bronze in the final. Kerber wanted to congratulate him before leaving.
"We were pulling out our trailer, I said I, gotta go see Shawn," Kerber said this week. "I ran back and was saying goodbye to everybody, and thinking how unbelievable is this league, and how awesome is it that we get to be a part of it?"
"Usually in a wind like that, you see a lot more differential in racing. And there were a lot of races that were runaways, but in some of those lightweight races - it was super close for super long."
"It absolutely was a topsy-turvy, highs and lows, across the league, Sprints, without a doubt," he said. "I think those conditions, combined with how feisty this league is, you can never turn your back on it.
"Hats off to (Penn coach Colin Farrell.) I said to him, I'm not surprised you won. No way. I said, one of these days you were going to get these races. His JV medaled and his 3V medaled. So, yea."
While Penn's win did surprise more than a few people, Farrell was not one of them. He told row2k after the win: "I think this was a year where it seemed any team could win it," he said. "It was really competitive all year, and you saw that this morning in the heats.
"We came here to try to win the race; that was our goal the whole year. I don't think what the other teams are doing today really changed our approach. We made some adjustments after the heat, they did a really good job executing it."
Kerber and his team had higher expectations for Sprints after going undefeated in the dual season, but he has a young crew, with four second-year rowers in the varsity eight. Even still, they were expected to advance out of their seeded lane in the heat.
Kerber said he made some minor adjustments before the heat. "Gearing, nothing major, not like a clam, more for comfort. But we got a little bit down, and things weren't right, and they kind of got a little bit frazzled. That's all. They said they couldn't get a bite on the water."
The next day, Cornell went back to work, and Kerber is looking for some bounce back. "I think the standard line out in Ithaca is, we just have to redeem ourselves, it's a great opportunity to shake it off, have short term memory, and then just get back to what we remember and that's the daily commitment, the day-to-day, session-to-session commitment to what we've doing, to the mission."
Results aside, Kerber appears to have completely enjoyed the day. He has said from the start of the season that the parity between schools is amazing. Several coaches have said the same thing this year, including Marty Crotty at Princeton, and Columbia's Nich Lee Parker, coach of the defending IRA champions.
"The beauty of lightweight rowing, especially this year, is its unpredictability," Parker said. "Any of the eight teams racing next weekend can win. This is rowing, and racing at its best."
Lightweight Women
Based on the fact that they are the defending champion - and have been the last four years - Stanford is going into the women's portion of the IRA the clear favorite. Among the seven teams entered, Stanford is ranked first, followed by Princeton, Boston University, Harvard-Radcliffe, Wisconsin, Georgetown, and MIT.
Of the crews that will be contesting for the championship, Princeton is probably the best candidate to unseat Stanford. They have been building wins and confidence over the last three seasons, and after placing in the top three at Women's Sprints the two previous seasons - bronze in 2017, silver in 2018 - Princeton took gold this year.
Coach Paul Rassam concedes favorite status to the Cardinal, but he is not conceding the racing, not before it begins, and not based on what he sees as the strength of his crew.
"Things are going well," Rassam said. "Obviously, we're looking at trying to take on Stanford, and that's a tough nut to crack. They haven't looked particularly shaky at all this season. But, I've got a pretty exciting crew.
"They are an attacking crew and not the type to sort of sit back and hope that Stanford falters," he said. "We're definitely going to try to bring it to them, and I think Stanford knows that, and that's what makes it exciting.
"There should be fireworks. Again, they're a tough nut to crack but we're going to give it a go."
Being in this position is something that Princeton has been working for over the last few seasons, Rassam said. "We've been sort of building towards this. We were bronze at Sprints two years ago. We were silver at Sprints last year. So, it hasn't come out of the blue, but this is certainly the best year we've had in a while."
Asked to list the strengths of his team, Rassam described them like this:
"It's a really motivated group. It's one of the most motivated groups in a while. They're aerobically very fit, and I think they're tough. They definitely like to race at a very high cadence, I gave up on trying to control that a while ago.
"Sometimes, you've just got to let a crew do what it wants to do, especially when it's working. And so, I've done that. They've got the technical ability to sort of pick it up off of the front end at that very high cadence, and they've got a pretty high aerobic capacity. An aggressive racing style is what they bring and that's what I expect them to bring at IRA."
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