With the Red Sox in the hunt for the World Series, the Patriots and Boston College producing no shortage of football highlights, and the Celtics set to return to their long-gone glory, it's hard for any other New England sport to get a word in edgewise.
Yet this weekend, one event will captivate the entire region without a single ball being thrown, kicked or passed.
Rowing will take center stage as the Head of the Charles kicks off Saturday. Thousands of rowers from all over the nation - and the world - will head over to the Charles River to take part in and watch the regatta.
"What makes this so amazing is the sheer size of the regatta," senior Laura Sherman said. "It's not just a collegiate event. There's an Olympic team coming, the national team from Australia is coming ... it's a huge mass representation of crew from around the world."
"The Head of the Charles is a culture," senior co-captain Caitlin Gallagher added. "As a rower, it's one of the only times I've seen where rowing is the main event. Even everyday, normal people are going. It's a celebration of this sport."
While a regatta of this scale could easily intimidate some people, the women's crew team will be ready for the challenge. Tufts will send two varsity eight boats to partake in the Collegiate Eight race, which they've been looking forward to all fall.
But it won't be all fun and games for the Jumbo rowers, who have been working arduously to prepare for the 5,000-meter distance on a course that is very different from what they're used to.
To get used to the river's length, the team spent most of last week practicing rowing longer distances at a faster rate. For most races this fall, the team would row at 18-20 strokes per minute, but this race will require them to go up to 30-32 spm, typical for a headrace.
But despite the increase in speed, the hardest aspect of this race will be adjusting to all the sharp turns on the river.
"It's going to be a lot of boats in a very small space," coach Gary Caldwell said. "They're not all going at the same speed, which makes steering more of on element in this race than any other race this fall."
The bulk of that responsibility lies with the coxswain, and senior Alison Ungerleider, the coxswain for the first varsity boat, will have her work cut out for her.
"Alison is maybe the best women's coxswain I've had here in my 19 years of coaching," Caldwell said. "She knows exactly what she's doing, and the rowers all absolutely respect her and trust her judgment and will do whatever she tells them to."
Most of the turns occur underneath the many bridges over the river, and there are two particular bridges where the turns can be hard to navigate. The first is the Weekes Footbridge, where there is a wide turn that can become tricky, especially when two boats try to make the turn at the same time and can end up too close to one another. The hardest turn comes some 300 meters before the end of the race, as a sharp left turn at the Elliott Street Bridge has caused problems for many crews in the past.
"For a very, very long and very, very skinny and fast boat to turn at that angle - it's not an easy thing to do," Gallagher said.
Gallagher and her teammates have been preparing for all these turns by practicing on their own home river, where they have the benefit of a turn similar to one on the Charles. While the turns pose potential disaster spots, they can end up as an advantage to the Jumbos if they learn to maneuver them well.
"It takes a really good coxswain and a good crew to make a tough turn like that," Gallagher said. "We can gain on other boats and go ahead if we can make that turn better than the other boats."
Tufts will also be helped out by the sizeable crowd that gathers annually for the event to cheer on and motivate the rowers.
"It's cool because all of Boston comes out for this," Gallagher said. "You're a part of this huge thing and you're at the center of it and you're what this entire festival is about."
