While the varsity team might be finished for the fall, the novice crew still had one race to go, and it went out with a bang in the NESCAC-NERC Novice Championships at Worcester. Both the men's and women's teams finished relatively well in their final race of the fall season.
Out of the dozen boats that raced in the men's race, the Tufts A boat finished fourth and the B boat finished 11th.
"I think we did well overall," coach Jim Burke said. "We were going up against a bunch of different schools that had different levels of experience. I was pleased with the way both boats ran."
The second boat ran into some trouble when it caught a crab in the first third of the race. While this was initially a setback, it did not worry Burke a bit.
"They recovered nicely from [the crab incident]," the coach said. "I feel like they rode a good race; the effort was there. I think it was as simple as the fact that the other boats were just faster than we were."
The men's team, while young, has a bright future. They have two freshman coxswains, Danielle Damm and Maya Brakhman, who come from unlikely sources. The men's team was searching for coxswains and Brakhman came from the women's novice team; according to Burke, Damm came from out of nowhere.
"[Damm and Brakhman] together have done a good job considering that they are so young," Burke said.
On the whole, the men's team's results this fall season are impressive considering that some of the rowers had never handled an oar before. The novice Jumbos will use this winter to improve their speed with the help of the more-experienced varsity team.
The women's novice team is even more inexperienced, being comprised of nearly all freshmen. Like the men's team, many of the rowers had not had previous rowing experience in high school, so crew was a completely new experience for them.
Despite this, the women's novice crew performed remarkably well this year in the Novice Championships. The Tufts A boat finished second behind Wesleyan with a time of 17:12, and the B boat was close behind at fourth with a time of 18:38 in the two-mile race. Last year, the team's highest finish was at fifth.
"I think one of our strengths is that our team all together is very close skill-wise," freshman Handy Hahnel said. "We were the first B boat to finish. It says a lot that all the girls are busting their butts together. We're really strong as a team."
The women's team also raced for the first time with its newly appointed captains, freshmen Kerri Martin and Langue Clancy.
While Martin was encouraged by her team's performance, she did acknowledge that there were obstacles on the way to the strong finish.
"It was really, really cold outside," the freshman co-captain said. "It made it a little difficult at times to focus. At certain times during warm-ups when we would stop, it would hit us hard, but during the race, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be."
Like the men, the winter will be about improvement for the women's novice team, but the team members realize that one thing they don't have to worry about is chemistry.
"I think in general we all work together," Martin said. "We're becoming better at knowing each other and how each of us rows."
With spring comes the hope of an even better season for both novice crew teams, and in the way they ended the fall, there appears to be good reason to look forward to the second half of the 2005-06 season.
