head of the charles

Boston, Mass. - The University of Tulsa women's rowing team posted an 11th-place finish in the Club 4+ on Saturday afternoon at the Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston, Mass.

The Club 4+, led by Danielle Guccione at coxswain and consisting of Nicole McNamee, Sara Schlesinger, Erica Dean and Vanessa Andrews, finished in a time of 19:46.75, just 36 seconds behind first-place Don Rowing Club.

"It was a good, tight race," Head Coach Kevin Harris said. "I am happy with the team's performance, they couldn't have done anything more. They represented TU well and Danny coxed the boat with style and intelligence after stepping into the boat just a week ago."

The Golden Hurricane will continue competition in the Head of the Charles on Sunday in the Championship 4+ ad Lightweight 4+.
Raised in competitive Ivy League rowing towns, captain Pat Mulcahy and fellow senior Matt Young were brought up to hate Harvard, their hometown schools' rival on the water.

But in the end, the two lightweight standouts couldn't resist the call of the Charles.

Hailing from Ithaca, N.Y., and Philadelphia, Penn., respectively―the homes of lightweight crew powerhouses Cornell and Penn―Mulcahy and Young have long been exposed to top-notch crews.

By living in places where crew was a prominent sport, the two benefited from great coaching and plenty of local competition when they were rowing in high school.

"Some of the high school boats that come from smaller programs in less crew-centered areas only have a couple chances to race at the national big regattas―a couple of them every year," Young said. "But for us, from the first two weeks into the season, you'd be racing your top competition for the rest of the year, which is nice."

Inspired by the Cornell crew that rowed in his hometown, Mulcahy eagerly awaited the days when he himself would be rowing at the elite Ivy League level.

"Just seeing the strength and the power and the speed that these boats could produce made it very appealing and definitely something to look forward to, because our high school team was kind of rag-tag, and getting boats moving quickly wasn't always too easy to do," Mulcahy said.

But when the time came to move on to collegiate rowing, Mulcahy and Young decided to look past their hometown schools and pack their bags for Harvard, leaving behind the waters where they learned to love crew to make new waves on the Charles.

Although Mulcahy's father is a professor at Cornell―where his twin brothers are now sophomores―Mulcahy wanted a change from Ithaca, where he had lived his whole life. Looking for a place that combined the bustle of city life with a strong rowing tradition, Mulcahy rekindled his love for rowing on the Charles.

"Rowing on the Charles as compared to the inlet is quite a change," Mulcahy said. "There's so many other crews, it really is kind of a mecca of rowing. The Head of the Charles is a good example of that. It's just so much talent and so many people in such a close area, they kind of feed off each other and really do well."

As for Young, after watching Harvard's lightweight varsity rout Penn in an open-water win at the IRA finals, he had his mind almost made up.

"It was just a totally different league of rowing," Young said, "so that put a little twinkle in my eye."

But though Harvard had wowed Young once, it took a disastrous recruitment visit to Yale to clinch his decision. Wavering between Harvard and Yale, Young visited both colleges one last time. While at Yale, Young was out on a launch with Bulldogs lightweight crew coach during an afternoon practice when a Yale heavyweight boat collided with a sculler going the wrong direction on the Housatonic River. The sculler was injured in the crash.

"It was kind of a traumatic experience," Young said. "We had to pull his single out of the water, and it was like Jaws. I had fun with the kids there, they were friendly, but that was kind of a little stain on the entire experience. The kid ended up being okay, though."

Since Mulcahy and Young joined the Crimson lightweights, the Harvard program has reached some important milestones.

As freshmen in 2005, both Young and Mulcahy watched as the first and second varsity eights swept gold at Eastern Sprints. The win marked the Crimson's first varsity Sprints win since 1997 and the first time both varsity eights had won gold since 1991. After the pair joined the varsity program in 2006―Young rowed in the varsity eight and Mulcahy in the third varsity during their sophomore season―the lightweights took fourth at Eastern Sprints in 2006 and fifth in 2007.

Disappointing results at Eastern Sprints, however, yielded to excellence at IRAs, where the varsity lightweights have missed a gold medal by a combined 1.138 seconds in two seasons. Harvard earned silver both times, falling by the narrowest of margins to Cornell.

Last year, they took home all three cups up for grabs in dual competition: the Biglin Bowl for wins over Dartmouth, the Haines Cup after sweeping the Navy lights in all three varsity races, and the Goldthwait Cup with a varsity win over Yale and Princeton. The lightweight varsity finished with a 6-1 dual record a season ago, the lone loss coming at the hands of eventual national champion Cornell.

But despite the Crimson's strong seasons in 2006 and 2007, Cornell bested Harvard twice when it counted most. And in ancient rowing tradition, race winners take home the losing crews' T-shirts along with their gold medals.

Watching Cornell put on the Crimson colors is an unpleasant sight for any Harvard oarsmen―but especially for Mulcahy, who returned home to see the Cornell crew sporting his shirt during practice in Ithaca.

"I spent a lot of time in the summer out in a single on the inlet, and since we start later, Cornell is typically out for about a month while I'm out there in the mornings," Mulcahy said. "So I'm seeing the same guys, and they're wearing the Harvard shirts that they've won. It definitely makes you want to work harder."

With Mulcahy as captain and Young as the lightweight protocol (LP), the other official leadership position in Newell boathouse, the Harvard lightweights have already begun their quest for gold at IRAs, even if it is just October.

And come springtime, the Crimson will meet Cornell and Penn in the first week of the spring racing season. Mulcahy and Young will have their first chance to show off the strength of Harvard's crew to their hometown teams.

"The really exciting thing for me this season is our first race of the season is at Cornell against Cornell and Penn, so it's my actual home course, senior year, against the best team in the country for the last two years," Mulcahy said. "I'd really like to shake things up there. I'm hoping to bring out the Ithaca supporters for Harvard for that one."

But first comes the Head of the Charles, where the Crimson will have its chance to size up the competition and also to gauge where it stands this season.

Although there is usually just a modest number of spectators at the early-morning races, the Head of the Charles draws the biggest crowd of the season, adding to the excitement of the first big race.

"It's such a spectacle," Young said. "It's not just a race. You just row down the river, and there are so many people on every bridge, on the river banks, just shouting at you, there are bands playing at Harvard…It's like rowing through a circus." It is an October afternoon in the year 2000. A girl stands beside her father, gazing out over the water as the setting sun burns orange into the soft waves. There's a sensory overload―the whoosh of oars slicing the smooth surface of the river combines with the smell of hot dog vendors, the sight of families stretched out on picnic blankets, and the faint buzz of cars rolling by on Memorial Drive.

Little does the girl, standing at water's edge with her father on that October afternoon, know that in a few years she will be captain of a team that has been to the NCAA Championships 10 times, scraping the top of that very river, fighting her way down the sinuous Head of the Charles race course.

Co-captain Laura Larsen-Strecker grew up not far from this Cambridge scene, in adjacent Brookline. She began rowing in her freshman year of high school, after her father took her to watch the Head of the Charles Regatta, and she went out on those sacred waters a few months later. Larsen-Strecker rowed throughout high school, participating in the Head of the Charles as a junior and senior and deciding in her final year to continue her rowing career at Harvard.

In her freshman season, she rowed for the Black and White varsity heavyweights during the 40th edition of the Head of the Charles. Despite a bout of strep throat just days before the marquee fall regatta in her sophomore season, Larsen-Strecker hit the Charles again but felt her performance suffered. An injury left her sitting out the weekend in her junior year, so this final year on her home course is a special one.

And this year is all the more significant for Larsen-Strecker because she is one of just a few seniors racing for the Radcliffe heavyweight varsity.

In previous years, senior leadership spurred Radcliffe during the spring racing season, but this year, a young squad gives the Black and White varsity a different look. Two juniors―commodore Sarah Moore and co-captain Liz Demers―round out the formal leadership positions for the team.

Despite there being fewer seniors, their influence remains strong, and Larsen-Strecker paces them at the front.

"It's not the three of us leading the team solely," Demers says. "It is the senior group as a whole―it is their team. We just have the titles."

Having spent the majority of her rowing career on the Charles and participated in the Head of the Charles for five of the past six years, Laursen-Strecker recalls the shift from high school to collegiate crew, recognizing it as a contrast in terms of training and technical focus on the water.

"In high school, [the Head of the Charles] was the culmination of all the training prior to the race," Larsen-Strecker says. "Fall season would start two weeks into August, four weeks earlier than here, [and] Head of the Charles would be the highlight of the fall. Everything was less exciting."

As opposed to high school rowing, the regatta is a celebratory and light-hearted one at the college level, since it occurs just a few weeks after the start of fall training.

"We are not quite as technically exact, the details are just starting to come together," Larsen-Strecker explained.

Because of its early date in the season, the Head of the Charles is not a proper indicator of the spring season to come, as more practice and more races yield quite a different squad after a long cold winter of training inside. What also brings about a gradual refinement of the team dynamic is the annual graduation of a senior class and the influx of a new freshman class. These changes have profound effects on a team in a sport with such a communal nature, as boats change annually with the departure of some oarswomen and the arrival of others. Lineups for the Head of the Charles are not finalized

until the last days of the week before the Regatta, as sophomores get used to the varsity program.

Nonetheless, the team feels confident heading into this first fall test. Larsen-Strecker and Demers have the team ready to succeed.

"Laura is extremely wise on the river, she has great boat feel and great knowledge of the stroke," Demers said. "It's hard to train really hard consistently, but she does it."

This final year marks the culmination of Laura's career, a seven-year journey across the river that winds through Boston, with the Head of the Charles as a positive kick-start for the team she co-captains.

"The one race I really latched onto was the Head of the Charles. Just the whole feeling around the weekend with all the people watching and all the boats on the water," Larsen-Strecker said. "Rowing is a relatively anonymous sport and it is nice to have other people notice that you are around."

Larsen-Strecker is excited to fill her new role as leader, so much so, that perhaps this is not the final year we will see her traversing the bridge early in the morning, making her way to the boathouse, or gliding her paddle across the river that dominated her teenage years. Masters crew lingers as an opportunity to continue doing what she loves.

"Rowing is such a part of my life and who I am that it is hard to imagine that after this year I will not be rowing in the same capacity as I am now." Larsen-Strecker said. "The dynamic of being on a team and all the time we put in, training with my teammates―I can't imagine ever giving that up."
Rowers from 15 to 80 years old and thousands of spectators from all over the world will hit the Hub beginning today for the Head of the Charles Regatta, the Super Bowl of rowing.

Now in its 43rd year, the regatta is expected to draw an international crowd of more than 300,000 to the banks of the Charles River to watch almost 9,000 competitors try to row their way to glory today and tomorrow. One thousand athletes representing 18 countries will race.

Attendance, of course, will depend on the weather, which should be favorable this weekend.



After a possible shower early today, cloudy skies will give way to sunshine and temperatures in the lower 70s. Expect more beautiful weather on Sunday, with a high temperature of 74.

The Regatta features a variety of backgrounds, including college and professional athletes and a tapestry of success stories.

Ariel Gilbert, who was the first blind racer to compete in the Head of the Charles in 2004, will be competing in her fourth straight Regatta. Gilbert uses a vessel that accommodates her disablity, but she has won gold medals among world-class competition in a regular vessel.

"I like the challege of the course, and meeting up with friends from all over the country. The atmosphere is so exciting," said Gilbert, who is with the Marine Rowing Association from Corte Madera, California.

The youngest competitor this weekend is 15 years old, compared to the oldest competitor, who is 80. Such a diverse roster is what makes the event so attractive to spectators, said regatta spokesman Jim Connelly.

"I think it's seeing so many types and ages, and backgrounds coming togeter to race," he said. "It doesn't matter how old you are, you can take part in what is the Super Bowl of rowing."