Nov. 16, 2009

The feeling among the UMass Lowell women at dinner Saturday night was that they had missed an opportunity to win.

With Drexel University’s freshman/novice eight within range in the last 500 meters, the River Hawk women were closing, but just couldn’t finish and fell behind to take second in the Frostbite Regatta on the Cooper River in Camden, NJ.

The feeling Sunday morning as the team drove the short distance from New Jersey to the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia for the Bill Braxton Memorial Regatta - the second of back-to-back races - was that they would not pass on another chance.

With revenge on their minds, the River Hawk women’s eight with Katrina Walther, Ianna Hondros-McCarthy, Janine Estes, Amanda Murray, Kerry Siebert, Emily Graham, Irene Cassidy, Sarah Atherton and coxswain Samantha O’Leary, jumped off the starting line and never gave the field a chance.

The result was the boat’s second Gold medal of the fall and a nearly 27-second gap over Drexel.

“I wanted it more than anything else,” said Estes. “I wanted our boat to accomplish something big this fall and I wanted to make our school and our coaches proud.”

They did that, and more.

In two days of competition against established NCAA teams from the Mid-Atlantic, the UMass Lowell rowing team proved that they are more than ready to step onto the NCAA stage and not only perform but excel.

During the two-day trip South, the River Hawk men and women competed with distinction. In addition to the eight’s performance Saturday, the varsity women’s four of Walther, Hondros-McCarthy, Estes, Murray, and coxswain Kate Dufault, took fourth, while the men’s novice four of, Bryan Fricot, Ben Busiek, Jon Fishbein, Josh Turner, and Chanthu Phauk, finished third.

On Sunday the men’s novice/freshman eight with Fricot, Busiek, Fishbine, Turner, Mike Strain, Kevin Sorge, and Alex Duval, with coxswain Phauk, contributed a third place finish to the effort.

And that was not all for the River Hawk rowing team.

An hour North in Princeton, NJ, senior Daniel Brooks, was etching his name into the log books of the U.S. national team coaches at the U.S. Rowing Fall Speed Orders.

In two-days of competition that included a 6,000 meter erg test inside the storied Princeton University Boathouse, followed by a head race Sunday on Lake Carnegie, Brooks – who only began racing in the single shell in September – finished 16th in a field of 32 elite and pre-elite men, many of who have already competed for the national team.

Michael Sivigny, who trains out of the UMass Lowell Boathouse and is coached by UMass Lowell head coach Veronika Platzer, won the head race and finished six on the erg. Sivigny, who also recently won the Championship Single at the Head of the Charles in Boston four weeks ago, wrapped up a stellar racing season and should be a lock for an invitation to the national team camps when they begin.

In all, the UMass Lowell team performance set the stage for the team’s emergence as an NCAA varsity sport in 2010.

Not only did the women take the Gold in their final, but led the field of ten in commanding fashion, beating such established programs as Temple, Drexel, Philadelphia University, Penn State, and Binghamton.

“We’re not waiting to go NCAA to go fast,” said Platzer. “We’re doing it now. This weekend was a preview of what we will face next spring when we go back to Philadelphia for the championship races at the Dad Vail Regatta.

“We’re going to be an aggressive program from the start," she added. "What program takes their athletes to race in three different events in one weekend and has a first year sculler competing among some of the best the rowers in the country? We’re that program and we do it not only because it is the right thing to do but because that’s the past history of UMass Lowell program.

“This was a very good fall for our team,” Platzer noted.