The IU rowing team will begin its spring season Saturday morning with a double dual against Kansas, Louisville and Michigan State. While these teams have met in previous seasons, assistant coach Amanda Perry said all of that goes out the window.
“A team can be entirely different from the fall to the spring, whether it be the positive or the negative,” Perry said. “You always have to keep your guard up and expect everybody to be fast.”
IU senior rower Leslie Beatty said she remembers competing against Michigan State during the past Big Ten Championships and regular season races, and IU fared well.
Beatty said she is excited to face some of the best competition they have taken on and see how the Hoosiers perform after all of the hard work they put in during the offseason.
However, all of this excitement doesn’t come without hard training during the fall and winter, which is necessary for improvement, junior rower Madison Chaplin said.
“The winter is mostly about getting faster, working on techniques on the water and building speed on the erg so we can be ready for the spring,” Chaplin said.
“Ergs” are indoor rowing machines that rowers use to simulate the action of rowing on the water. They’re mainly used in the winter for training when the water is frozen.
As the first race of the spring season, the double dual becomes a highly anticipated race for the rowers and coaches.
It’s been a long layoff since the team had this taste of competition because the last competitive race occurred Nov. 11 in Columbus, Ohio. Perry said being away from competition for that long really brings energy back to the team.
“We spend the whole year, from August to March, preparing for the spring racing,” Perry said. “So once it starts its like fireworks going off.”
It’s the part of the season where races start to come like rapid fire. The team has two back-to-back competitions just in the month of April, and this weekend’s double dual begins that stretch.
The double dual is split into two sessions, the morning session and the afternoon session. The novices of each school will start off the day at 9 a.m. and the varsity morning session will be held at 9:36 a.m. In the afternoon, the novices will begin at 12:30 p.m., while the varsity rowers will begin at 1:06 p.m.
Total scores will be tallied after the morning and afternoon sessions. Points will be assessed based on what place each boats comes in during their individual race. All of the scores will be combined to determine a victor from the morning and afternoon session.
