The women’s rowing team began its Fall 2012 season on Saturday at the Navy Day Regatta along the Schuylkill River. For the Owls, the regatta met all expectations.
The Owls competed in four races: the womens collegiate 4+, junior varsity 8+, Novice 4+, and women’s open/collegiate 8+. The meet started off well for Temple as the one of the Owls’ 4+ boats finished third overall.
“It’s what I knew we were capable of doing,” coach Rebecca Smith Grzybowski said. “We’ve been laying the ground work for a solid race and executing what we worked on in practice; the result took care of itself.”
The third-place boat, timing in at 16 minutes and 42 seconds, featured strokeseat junior Victoria Joye.
“[I wanted to] stay relaxed,” Joye said. “[I wanted to] trust that everyone behind me was going to follow me.”
Being a head race, Joye and her boat had few ways to tell if they were preforming well.
“It’s interesting in a head race because you can’t actually see if you’re even near anyone,” Joye said. “It was cool to see us walking away from the boat behind us- every stroke walk away, walk away, walk away.”
The other 4+ boat finished in 9th with a time of 17:18.
“We had a last second lineup change,” Grzybowski said. “They rolled with it, very adaptable.”
As the Owls’ season is in its early stages, Grzybowski intends to continue changing up the boats’ lineups. For this regatta, the lineups were successful.
The strongest performance of the day came from the Owls’ Novice 4+ boat. With a final time of 18:13, the young Owls were able to place second.
This boat featured strokeseat freshman Grace Kroner.
“There was a lot of power,” Kroner said. “We were all moving together. We passed a boat at the very beginning, and we could see ourselves walking away from them through the whole race, and towards the end we passed two more; that gave us a lot of momentum.”
While the Novice and Collegiate 8+ boats were the highlights for the Owls’ performances, the other boats had fine results as well.
The Owls 8+ boats finished 9th and 10th respectively, posting times of 16:38 then 17:02.
The Owls’ 8+ open boats came in 11th and 13th respectively, posting times of 16:09 then 16:20.
All the Owls’ boats accomplished two things on Saturday: There were no penalties and they all finished no more than two minutes behind 1st place.
The Owls’ compete again next weekend in Boston on October 20-21.
Liam McKenna can be reached at liam.mckenna@temple.edu.
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