After a draining weekend of racing and traveling, the UW crew teams are looking to relax at the 30th annual Midwest Rowing Championships. The Badgers have won the event 27 times in 29 appearances and are undefeated since 1982.
The men’s crew is recovering from a brutal West Coast trip in which the team raced three ranked teams in less than 26 hours with more than 1,000 miles of traveling between. The Badgers began the weekend Saturday against No. 3 Washington. The team could not overcome a bad start, losing to the Huskies by a boat length.
They then traveled to California Sunday to take on No. 1 Cal as well as No. 15 Stanford. Wisconsin hung with California for the first half of the race but could not hold on against the team with seven Olympic rowers. Coming off the loss, the Badgers ended the trip on a good note by easily defeating Stanford that same afternoon.
“We knew it’d be a battle for us, so I think we raced them pretty solidly,” junior Pete Giese said. “I think we got better as we went along in the weekend, and hopefully we learned some lessons from it.”
Despite the losses this past weekend, men’s crew moved up one spot in the polls to No. 5. The team is resting with lighter practices this week but is still trying to improve on rowing as a unit. Even with a lack of top-notch competition coming to the Midwest races, head coach Chris Clark is still worried.
“Regardless of who’s here, I’m concerned,” Clark said. “You just want to make sure that you don’t take a step backward from the week before. [The other teams are] going to race like they’re going to race, [so] it’s my team that I’m worried about.”
The coach should be able to relax, as the only other ranked team at the event will be UW women’s lightweight crew, who enters the weekend sitting atop of the polls. The undefeated team continued its domination last weekend in New Jersey against top rivals Princeton and Radcliffe. The Badgers started by taking the Knecht Cup Saturday with an impressive victory over No. 2 Princeton, No. 3 Radcliffe, No. 5 Delaware and No. 7 Georgetown.
“I expected to be challenging Princeton and Radcliffe,” lightweight coach Maren LaLiberty said. “We certainly were pleasantly surprised when we found that we were able to get open water over them.”
The ladies followed their strong performance with another win Sunday at the Villanova Invitational by knocking off Princeton and Radcliffe once again. The team is off to a 4-0 start and should have no problems in the Midwest sprints. LaLiberty attributes their early success to working well together and putting the team first.
” I think we’re really driven this year by wanting to have great performances,” LaLiberty said. “It’s really important that everybody understands that winning is not always in our control, but performing well is. Winning depends on so many factors other than your performance, so we really try to concentrate on having [our] best performance in the race.”
The top-ranked Badgers will have to find some extra strength this weekend as they row in the openweight division. The undersized women have faired well in previous openweight races and are excited by the challenge.
All races will take place Saturday on Lake Wingra, with the first starting at 7:30 a.m. and the last at 4 p.m. More than 1,000 rowers are expected at the Midwest Rowing Championships from schools such as Minnesota, Kansas, and Cincinnati, among many others. The home regatta should showcase Wisconsin’s dominance as the highly ranked crews go for their 20th win in a row.
