By Robert Frankenstein
Tuscaloosa, Ala. – Alabama rowing took their first step into the 2020 NCAA rowing season on Saturday. The power of pink dual meet between Alabama, Southern Methodist University, and Eastern Michigan was a one-sided outing.
Results from this season’s first competition:
Alabama started off the meet by sweeping the first four events of the day while finishing second place in the meet’s final competition. The teams 4V8’s and 3V8’s took first and second in the meets opening 2000-meter race. These are the teams fourth and third fastest 8 person boats respectively. In the second event of the day, Alabama’s 2V4 won their 2000-meter race by a comfortable 14 second margin.
Saturday’s third race was between the 1V4’s, each school’s fastest four girl boat. The closest race of the day was decided in the final 100 meters, with Alabama coming out on top with a time of 8:24.3 while second place Southern Methodist crossed the finish line with a 8:27.7. The fourth race of the day was the 2V8’s, where the Crimson tide once again would not be denied the victory with a time of 7:32.0.
The Crimson Tide one the first four races of the morning and almost had a clean sweep of the days five events. However, the 1V8 team from SMU was able to take home the win with a 7:19.5. The 1V8 for Alabama meanwhile put up a disappointing 7:31.6.
Is this season’s goal of reaching the NCAA Championship obtainable?
Talking to head coach Glenn Putyrae after the meet, he said that this season’s opening meet went well but not how he would have liked it to play out. “This week our athletes have faced a lot of adversity. Whether it is the current of the river, injuries popping up, illnesses, whatever the case may be,” Putyrae commented. “Unfortunately, the one boat we thought was going to be the most dependable boat turned out to be the least dependable, so we’ve got a lot of work to do but we knew that coming into today.”
Before this season began, Putyrae mentioned that one of this team’s goal for the season is to qualify for the NCAA rowing championships for the first time ever. The gap between Alabama and Texas in Big 12 rowing at the end of last season was very big, but the team hopes to make progress towards the Longhorns winning tradition this season.
After today’s lack luster performance from the 1V8’s, Putyrae had strong feelings about the team’s effort. “We’ve got to get faster; I think what is really getting at us is too many distractions at practice,” Putyrae said. “We need to approach everyday with more of a race mentality and with more focus so we can perform to the absolute best of our abilities.”
There is a lot of cause for concern after the results from the power of pink dual meet. Let’s take a look at last year’s NCAA Rowing Championship. The slowest 2V8 team finished that meet with a time of 6:59.099 and the slowest 1V8 team finishing with a blazing time of 6:37.368. With the twos needing to drop over 30 seconds and the ones needing to drop over 50 seconds to likely qualify, the team may be looking at a multi-year process before than can comfortably qualify for NCAA’s.
Graduate Student Makena Clark is optimistic about the team’s future success. “With over 20 freshen on the roster this year, things are only going to improve,” She noted. “There’s always things for a team to work on after a meet, we’re going to practice hard and make some adjustments and be back to go even faster than we did today.”
What is the future of Alabama Rowing?
Ultimately, I think over the next four years, Alabama will make progress towards competing with Texas. Having 20 new additions to this year’s roster with eight of them being nationally ranked recruits, the depth of this roster will only continue to improve with the reigning Big 12 coach of the year at the helm.
The time period this team has to improve is just too short for them to make a significant jump this season unless some of the younger athletes on this team step up big. Their next competition is the Cardinal Invitational on March 14th in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Junior Izzie Gonzales talked about the adjustments the team plans on making ahead of their second competition of the spring season. “We will no doubt make some boat swaps, having some people move up and others move down in order to make the best team combination possible,” said Gonzales. “We won today but winning head to head is not the team’s ultimate goal, so we will get back to work and come out in two weeks better than we did today.”
After the Cardinal Invitational in the second week of March, Alabama will host their second and final home competition of the season where they will be facing off against another SEC rival who now find themselves competing amongst the Big 12, Tennessee. After the conclusion of that meet, the Crimson Tide will be just a month out from the biggest competition of the year at the Long Horn Invite in early April.
The Big 12 Championship and the NCAA Championship are just over two months away, and the Crimson Tide women are still confident and poised to make a late push for qualification.
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