Rowing Team Heads to Florida for Spring Break Training Trip

The Columbia heavyweight and lightweight crews will inaugurate their regular season with a training trip to Florida over spring break. Armed with new coaches and coming off of a short fall season, the Lions are looking to make their mark in key competitive meets.

The Light Blue’s season will consist of a series of dual and tri-meets against Ivy League and other northeastern competitors, the first of which will be the Rutgers Collins Cup in late March for the heavyweights and the Princeton-Georgetown meet in early April for the lightweights. But Columbia’s last game is the Eastern Sprints competition in mid-May, a meet in which the lightweight team placed second in the petite finals.

“You can lose every race of the season and win sprints, and that’s what people will remember,” senior Jason Novick said. “Obviously, though, we’re going to try to win all of our races and then win sprints.”

The Eastern Sprints league consists of the Ivy League and schools like Georgetown, Navy, and Delaware. While the group is ripe with competition, Novick was hard-pressed to pick a school he felt would be the toughest contender.

“It’s hard to say [which teams will be the strongest competitors],” he said. “Each year, the varsity boat at each school graduates X number of seniors or moves up a certain number of other guys, so we don’t know year to year who’s going to be the hot team.”

In the past, Dartmouth and Cornell have proved to be strong opponents, with the Big Red coming in second in last year’s second varsity eight competition at Eastern Sprints. Harvard has also generally been a reliably solid performer. But according to Novick, the Bulldogs will be the Lions’ mark for this season.

“I haven’t won the Yale race since my freshman year,” he said. “That’s the big one we want to win.”

Next week’s training trip should help equip Columbia with the necessary skills for such a win. After intense practices, the Lions will compete at the Governor’s Cup, a meet hosted by the Florida Institute of Technology. Although the Light Blue will face off against schools like the University of Central Florida, Marietta, and Notre Dame, the meet will serve as more an exhibition for the team, Novick said.

“This will be the first time we compete in a racing situation,” he said. “We’ll be able to see where we need to improve when we face our league competitors.”

The additions of Scott Alwin as the new lightweight rowing head coach and Jon Douglas and Ed Golding as new assistant coaches should also help the Lions improve their training. Junior Nick LaCava is also heading into the season after winning the CRASH-B sprints competition, often referred to as the “world indoor rowing championships,” and will undoubtedly be a strong asset for the Light Blue.