UTC's last team boat at ACRA was a Men's 2x in 2018 — second in the B final. McDarmont raced the W1x in 2019. Then COVID, then the program went dark for four years. The M4x in lane six Friday morning was the first UTC team boat at ACRA in eight years, and the first since the program restarted last fall. Mako on stroke; Richardson, Burkett, Pollard in the bow three. Three of them first sat in a shell on April 6.
Friday at 9:54 we went off the line in Heat 1 against Purdue, GMU, Bowdoin, Vanderbilt, and Grand Valley. We finished sixth in the heat. Time was 7:42.797. The heat winner, Purdue, posted 7:01.460. We weren't in the conversation. First 2k of their lives for the bow three. Nobody talked much at the dock after.
Top two crews plus the next two fastest times moved on to the Grand Final. We dropped to the B final.
Saturday at 15:37 the B final went off — five boats. UTC, Virginia RA, Vanderbilt, Bowdoin, Grand Valley. Photofinish on for the final lengths.
We took third by 0.562 seconds. Time: 7:37.900 — almost five seconds faster than the heat. Bowdoin won the B final with 7:23.273. We held off Virginia RA at the line. Vanderbilt, who had been right behind us in the heat, finished five and a half seconds behind us in the B.
Five seconds in a 2k overnight isn't fitness. Fitness takes months. Five seconds in twenty-four hours is the four of them figuring out how to row together under race conditions. None of the bow three had been in a 2k race before Friday morning.
What I asked them to do before the heat was: don't catch a crab, and compete with whatever is next to you. They didn't crab in either race. They competed with what was next to them. Friday that wasn't enough. Saturday it was.
The boat goes back on the trailer. Hooch is in the fall. The next thing is recruiting five more rowers who want to race against whatever is next to them — and getting enough of our own equipment in working order that we don't have to borrow it next time.
If you rowed at UTC, the site is at utcrowing.org. Send your photos, your memories, the names of teammates we don't have on the roster yet. The program is back. It'll be built by the people who came before it — and by whoever shows up next.