The crew team competed in its first regatta of the spring season last Sunday at the Knecht Cup on the Cooper River in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. The event had to be condensed to one day due to windy conditions on Saturday.
The men’s club four boat of junior club president Aaron Sigmond-Warner, senior Ben Arky, junior Isaac Odell, sophomore Christo Maheras and senior coxswain Kendall Lamm won its heat and earned the gold medal with a time of 7:12.19. Due to the shortened schedule, there was not a finals race, so the boat took home the gold medal having beat all 14 teams with its heat time.
While it was warmer on Sunday, the windy conditions still made racing challenging, according to Sigmond-Warner and junior Ellie Walsh.
Sigmond-Warner said that the high winds and “not knowing where your whole competition is around you and using the heat times,” made racing “stressful.”
“Our coxswain Kendall Lamm did a really good job of keeping us going straight down the race course in the four and then in the [club] eight [sophomore] Ryan Comisky,” Sigmond-Warner said. “They both did an outstanding job with those conditions and we wouldn’t be able to perform in races like that without them.”
“When it’s windy, it makes it really hard to balance the boat,” Walsh said. “It makes it harder to put power on and stay together, but I think we did well considering the conditions.”
The women’s varsity four boat of Walsh, junior Noni Lorentzen, sophomore Lili Gerstenschlager, sophomore Elle Lansing and sophomore coxswain Annabelle Witkowski placed first in its semi-final heat with a time of 7:48.29. In the final, they placed fifth out of six with a time of 8:00.41 behind Massachusetts, Jacksonville, Georgetown and Delaware.
Although the crew team is a club sport at Lafayette, Walsh said that competing against big Division I programs means they have to put in “extra work.”
“We practice six days a week,” Walsh said. “We have our spring break training trip, so we really just do whatever we can to make sure that we can compete on that level. We know what we need to do to be fast and we just put in the effort.”
The men’s club eight boat took home a silver medal, finishing just three seconds behind Michigan in its heat and above six other boats. The women’s novice four boat also placed second out of 15.
Senior Skye Loures took home a bronze medal in the six-boat women’s singles event (9:56.56). Sophomores Owen Piskorowski and Duncan White also earned a bronze medal in the six-boat men’s varsity pair with a time of 7:56.02.
The team will travel to the Kerr Cup on the Schuylkill River on Friday but is setting its sights on the Jefferson Dad Vail Regatta — the largest collegiate regatta in the United States — which will begin on May 10.
“That is the race we train towards,” Sigmond-Warner said. “The goal is to win that or at least get a medal. That’s the goal for all the boats we’re sending. The whole team has been working very hard and I’m very proud of the work everyone’s been putting in. I’m very optimistic about how we’re all going to perform there.”
Disclaimer: Business Manager Jacob Moldover ’24 is a member of the crew team. He did not contribute writing or reporting.
