Girls’ Crew Sweeps PEA Invitational
This past Saturday, the girls’ varsity crew team traveled to Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester, Massachusetts to host the Exeter Invitational. Northfield Mount Hermon, Shrewsbury, Boston Latin, Simsbury and Hingham raced against Big Red, but the Exeter girls came out on top. Both G1 and G2 won their races by five and eighteen seconds, respectively.
Faliero added, “This was challenging at first because each of the boats are different, and the combination of people really changes how the boat moves, but we worked out the kinks necessary in the warm up and were set to go by the time we reached the starting line.”
The Exeter Invitational was the team’s first race this season, and the girls wanted to set the bar high for the races to come. Upper Sophie Faliero elaborated on the intensity of the competition, saying, “Everyone was a little nervous at the beginning since this was our first race of the season, but once we hit the water, we were ready to get to the starting line. Overall, the girls swept, which was amazing, especially since there were five other schools we were competing against.” Despite various setbacks, such as only being on the water for ten days beforehand, the team was able to overcome these challenges and work its way into first place.
A huge factor that played into the team’s success this weekend was its strong cohesion amongst the members throughout the entire race. Upper Ashleigh Lackey credited this to earlier training, adding, “We worked a lot on meshing our styles of rowing to be more together.”
Faliero shared similar sentiments to Lackey regarding the team’s kinship. “It’s important that we are all connected and trusting of the people in front of us in the boat, because without that we wouldn’t be able to row,” Faliero said.
Faliero emphasized that the team’s success can be credited to each member. She said, “We were all there for each other, and each stroke we took was for the other people in the boat. It’s the collective effort to fight for one another that provided the outcome we had.”
During the practices leading up to Saturday, the team had frequently switched up their positions on the boats in an act known as seat racing. “We spent this entire week seat racing and competing against one another to figure out what will work best for the weekend,” Faliero said. “And, as always, we trained as hard as we could each day out on the water.”
Due to these seat races, the lineups on race day were relatively new to the Big Red girls, so they had to work together to unify the boat in the warm up before the race. “We had some last minute changes to our boats the day of, but everyone did a great job of adapting to new lineups,” Lackey mentioned.
Faliero added, “This was challenging at first because each of the boats are different, and the combination of people really changes how the boat moves, but we worked out the kinks necessary in the warm up and were set to go by the time we reached the starting line.”
This coming Saturday, the team will head down to Connecticut to race against Kent. This will be their second race of the season and should be an exciting matchup. Kent has a very strong rowing program and has proven to be one of Exeter’s biggest rivals on the water.
“The team is aggressively training for Kent,” Faliero said. “They are one of our fiercest competitors, and we are doing as much as we can, both on and off of the water, to prepare—morning practices, erg workouts before launching for practice on the water, eating and sleeping well, you name it.”
Looking ahead, Lackey wants to continue the successful team cohesion. She said, “One of our main goals is to really unite as a team. When we work to push ourselves and each other, the team benefits. Hopefully this will lead to a great season with good results at NEIRAs.”
Lower Shelagh Coombs also noted that the team still had room to improve, saying, “We raced at a higher rating than we should have, and even though we won, we could have had better margins with lower ratings but more control and power.” She added, “We are hoping to do very well this year and act as ‘one big boat’ as our coaches would say.”