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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers.

Sporting Life
July/August 2005

Lightweight crew back on top
by David Goldenberg '01

Lightweight-crew coach Andy Card can pinpoint the day the fortunes of his team began to change. On April 22, the Friday before the team left for Hanover to race Dartmouth and Rutgers, Card decided to tweak the way the team starts. Most top crews make use of an elaborate system of graduated strokes to minimize the amount of "white water" they churn up; the less air in the water, the theory goes, the more efficient the start. But before the Hanover race, Card felt the team was trying too hard to get the start just right. "Andy told us to forget about making it look nice," says captain Alex Ramsay '05, "and just pull really hard.

"It worked pretty well the next day," Card says -- in fact, Yale blew Dartmouth and Rutgers out by seven seconds -- "so we decided to keep it." The race was the start of an upsurge in boat speed and confidence that culminated in a wire-to-wire victory in the Intercollegiate Rowing Association National Championship in New Jersey on June 4 -- the lightweights' third national championship in six years.

Before the race in Hanover, the Bulldogs had been in the middle of a mediocre spring season that included losses to Navy and Cornell. And that was on the heels of an even worse fall season. But the team never lost focus, and its workmanship philosophy eventually struck gold. "None of us panicked at any time," says Card, "and we kept going back to the drawing board until we got it right."

After changing its starting technique, the Yale crew lost only to one team: Harvard. But the Crimson beat them twice, both times passing the Yale squad near the end of the race.

Harvard has been a particular problem for Yale's lightweights in recent years, even when the team has been at its peak. A last-second loss to Harvard in the national championship in 2001 was the only blip in a magnificent Eli run that included two prestigious Eastern Sprints titles (2001 and 2002) and two national championships (2000 and 2002). (The 2000 crew also made an improbable run against international heavyweight competition to win the Temple Challenge Cup at the storied Henley Royal Regatta in England.)

This year, while Yale was working out the kinks, Harvard was spectacular, finishing the spring season 10-1. In the Yale-Harvard-Princeton race in Cambridge on April 30, Yale showed flashes of the speed it is capable of, leading the pack by over a length at the halfway mark. But Harvard came back in the final quarter of the race, eventually pulling out the victory.

On May 15 at the Eastern Sprints in Worcester, Massachusetts, Yale once again took the lead with a good start, and once again Harvard came back, this time beating the Elis by less than a quarter of a second in one of the most closely contested races in Sprints history. Though Harvard won, Yale was encouraged by its performance. The team had rotated its lineup right before the race, moving David Werner '06 to the crucial stroke position, and the rowers were surprised at how quickly they had adjusted. "[Harvard] was only barely able to get through us," says Ramsay. "The guys came out really fired up, saying, 'just give us some more time.'"

By the national championship race, the Yale crew was confident that it could once again regain the stature of the squads of a few years ago. "Many of us came here [as freshmen] when Yale really was dominant," Ramsay says. "That made the '03 and '04 seasons very trying for most guys. A lot of us were very eager and determined to get back the legacy we came here expecting."

The crew qualified for the final race with the fastest time in the preliminary heats. In the final, though, their forceful start failed to get them the jump to which they had become accustomed; several teams managed to stay with the Elis. But by the halfway mark, Yale had pulled clear from the pack, and this time, no team, not even Harvard, was able to come back on them as they rowed to a national championship. "We're resilient," Card says, "and I think we proved it."