Dave Reischman is driving the launch out onto Onondaga Lake. I’m sitting on his left and it seems as good a time as any to ask the question he knows I have to ask – “What about your varsity being ranked number five in the first US Rowing poll?” He’s tempted to be facetious but Reischman gathers up an answer that sounds standard but that also rings true – because it is.
“Our thought is it’s nice to be recognized for the hard work you put in and I think having a Varsity Eight ranked fifth is truly something our whole program takes pride in,” he tells me. “It’s not going to happen without a JV and a 3V pushing them up. But it was based off one race early in the season and there’s a lot of crews that have yet to race so I imagine there’ll be lots of changes in the polls as we go through racing season.”
It was two races – the qualifying heat at the San Diego Crew Classic the previous Saturday and the Copley Cup final on Sunday when the Orange finished third to Cal (#2) and Brown (#4) but Reischman counts the weekend’s performance as one.
Now on this late Thursday afternoon he has his team in five four-oared shells. The guys who rowed in the eight in San Diego are in straight fours but not divided into stern four and bow four.
Mike Gennaro strokes one, with Chris Lutz, Tyson Bry and Dan Berry
Ryan Patton strokes the other, with Vince Berry, Dan Turner and Mike Dietrich.
“I think the straight four has a little lighter touch to it,” Reischman tells me. “I think sometimes it’s closer in speed to the eight in terms of how you get it moving. The four with is a little sluggish. I think there’s a better transfer in a straight four.”
The bowman steers with his foot.
“I think it’s all the pairs work we do too. If you’re rowing a pair and making it go straight you have to know how to apply power in a manner that makes it go straight.”
It is a gorgeous day – 75 degrees and sunny – with a bit of a cross-wind. Just two weeks ago, the coach notes, his crew had ice on their oars. Ah, Syracuse in spring!
Cornell and Navy at Annapolis are more than two weeks away and the coach has pointed out all along that his lineups are not set in stone. Sure, winning “regular season” races is nice but,”… our focus is on the Sprints and the IRAs and doing whatever we need go do on a daily basis to get ready for that.”
What he is doing today is a workout of an hour or so that will wrap up with four full out four minute pieces at 30 strokes-per-minute – the five boats side-by-side.
I had watched the team arrive on the bus before practice. The walked upstairs into the boathouse serious-faced and nearly silent and came down the same way, carrying out their oars and the shells and launching – all business.
“It’s really serious the second you get hands on,” Dan Berry told me later. “The rest of the time if you take it too serious you get annoyed, burned out – you get mad at each other so we keep it pretty loose except the times we’re on the water and as you can tell it gets pretty heated out there at times.”
Now, after some warm-up pieces at 26 and 28 and 30, the business gets really serious.
With graduate assistant Joe DeLeo and volunteer assistant Tyler Page in a launch on one side and Reischman on the other the shells line up on the Solvay side of Onondaga Lake.
Across the lake on the old IRA course we can see Coach Dave Weiss putting two boats of freshman through their paces.
“Sit ready,” Reischman calls through his old school megaphone. “Paddle.” Three strokes in they go to full power and the two straight fours pull ahead, battling one another. Reischman points out that they’re not carrying the weight of a coxswain.
“Good strong solid rhythm stroke after stroke,” he calls out to them. "Good power! Leg drive! Leg drive! Feel the surge, now. Feel the surge!”
When one boat pulls ahead he challenges the other. “All right Ryan Patton, are you gonna stay with them are you gonna stay with them?” The crew responds.
“Good solid power now! Legs together! One push! One push! Legs and body! Send it! Send it!”
Under 50 strokes to go and the crews battle. “A minute and a half - who’s going to press ahead? Be stubborn now! Be determined! Can you function when the heat’s on?
Here we go, Mike Dietrich. They’ve got a seat on you!”
They fight on until Reischman calls out “paddle.”
He drives over to get DeLeo and Page’s take on the boats closer to them. He switches a couple of oarsmen from shell to shell. “I think we have some talent in the JV,” he tells me. He’s figuring out who’ll be in that eight and whether any of them should move up to the Varsity boat.
The crews turn around facing toward the boat house. And they battle again. And a third time and a fourth. Reischman is into it. He admits to getting a little intense. Nobody complains. And then they are finished for the day.
“Good work guys,” the coach tells them. “Let’s take it home.”
“It looks like you guys are working hard,” I say later to Dan Berry’s twin brother Vince.
“We absolutely are,” he replies. “We just want to focus on getting better and getting progressively faster instead of just kind of settling and saying yeah we’re pretty good now we want to work on getting better.”
“If we settle for what we have now everybody’s going to sneak up on us like we did on some crews last year,” brother Dan adds. “We snuck up on Cornell through the IRA last year after they just spanked us when they were here. So if we settle now there’s no doubt that somebody like BU is gonna come up and bite us…”
The Goes Cup race is 16 days away. The Eastern Sprints – 45. 62 days to the IRA.
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