The crew team delivered an overwhelming victory in its final competition of the fall season at the Philadelphia Frostbite Regatta last weekend.
The regatta, which took place in Windsor, New Jersey on Saturday, was the team’s last competition until after spring break.
The team earned seven first-place victories at the competition: Women’s Frosh/Novice Four, Men’s Frosh/Novice Four, Women’s Varsity Four, Men’s Varsity Four, Men’s Frosh/Novice Eight, Women’s Varsity Eight and Men’s Varsity Eight.
While Lafayette was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition in some races, such as the Women’s Varsity Eight in which the nearest boat finished over 39 seconds behind the Leopards, other victories came down to the wire — Lafayette beat out Stockton University in the Men’s Frosh/Novice Eight and Men’s Frosh/Novice Four by just 0.73 seconds and 1.2 seconds, respectively.
“They were both very exciting,” senior Jacob Moldover said. Moldover was part of both of the narrow victories over Stockton.
“In the last about one hundred to two hundred meters of the men’s novice four race, the boat from Stockton that we had been holding off down the whole two [kilometer] course finally pulled just a couple feet in front of us,” Moldover said. “We pushed really hard and dug really deep and were able to take back the lead just at the finish line and win by a margin of about a second.”
For junior Aaron Sigmond-Warner, vice president of the crew team, the novice races also served as some of the most exciting of the event.
“Novice racing is particularly hard because just a few months ago, these guys were strangers,” Sigmond-Warner wrote in an email. “I have seen firsthand how they have come together as a team, with many of them having little or no prior rowing experience.”
Kendall Lamm, the team’s head coxswain and president, echoed Sigmond-Warner’s excitement.
“People race their entire lives to have a race that close,” she said. “[It was exciting] for [the novices] to be able to experience that right off the bat on this team, when you can see the excitement in their eyes [of] ‘this is what you do this for,’ because that feeling is like nothing else.”
Lamm shouted out the team’s race plan as a key factor in its weekend success. She explained the team’s training had prevented them from falling into the trap of “flying and dying” — starting the race off strong, but tiring out in the second half.
“You really cannot win your race off the start, but you can definitely lose your race off the start,” she said.
The team now looks forward to the spring season, in which its boats will work toward the Dad Vail Regatta in May.
“Lafayette’s performance by both the men’s and the women’s programs are an excellent indicator where we’re sitting for success in the spring,” Lamm said.
“We’re really excited to see how everyone on the team and especially those new members can progress into the spring season,” senior and women’s captain Rose Broderick said.
“[This performance] shows that our new training program that we implemented this fall, which was mostly technique-focused, is paying off pretty well,” Broderick continued. “In combination with the fitness work that we do over the winter … I think we’re gonna see some great payoff.”
Disclaimer: Business manager Jacob Moldover ’24 did not contribute writing or reporting.
