Coach's Comments on the San Diego Crew Classic

Syracuse men's rowing head coach Dave Reischman has distributed his post-race report. Here are excerpts:

If you are looking to gain some “six boats across” racing experience and put your crew in to a couple of good battles down the race course you can usually get it in San Diego.  The racing is a two day format with heats on Saturday and Finals on Sunday.

In the heat on Saturday, Cal has an outstanding crew this year and we suspected they would be out front. With some good work early in the race we thought we could control the other crews and finish second. What we did not plan on was one of the guys losing his seat and spending the first six strokes of the start scrambling to climb back on. Better now than later in the year.  I thought the guys did a good job of staying composed and, although we were well down after the start, quickly found a nice rhythm and moved into second about 750m in the race. The cadence was a bit low, 34ish, but there was good length and the boat was moving.  Cal was moving steadily away and we were able to keep our eye on the rest of the crews all the way down the course to finish in second place and advance to the grand final.
 
Some crews have the experience and skill to row the higher cadences down the race course early in the season and other crews take a while to develop the proper rhythm to do it. Most crews at this race are at 36-37 with some of the “warm weather” crews even rowing 38. Water time in February helps. This crew has very good endurance but we really haven’t done a lot of cadence work yet.  We had a much better start for the final and settled in at 35 spm to try to grind out the middle part of the race.  We were in 6th place coming through the 1000m but still had a good shot at 4th.  The guys really did a nice job in the 3rd 500m to get even with GWU and UBC and come level for fourth with about 500m to go but we spent a lot of energy doing it.  When it came time to sprint we didn’t have the legs left to change the boat speed and we finished 6th just about a 1/3 of a length down on GWU and UBC.  

We will continue to work on developing our racing cadence and we certainly need to have a little more juice off the line.  The last 500m will come as we get closer to Sprints and the IRA. 

All in all a good trip for us.  A special thanks to the San Diego area alums who came out to support us at the race.  Hopefully we can get back to the Crew Classic in the near future!

Next up for us is the Goes Trophy.  We are down in Ithaca this year and both Cornell and Navy have been racing well in the early season.  Racing starts at 9:00 am and you can find directions and other info on the racing as it becomes available at CORNELL ATHLETICS.