Racing Begins

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. – The Stanford women's rowing team opened its spring season by winning three of four races in a dual against Oregon State on a drizzly Saturday morning.

"Today was just about going into the blocks and seeing what you can do in your lane," Stanford coach Derek Byrnes said. "Really, it's an opportunity to see what it's like to get a 2K in and have that sensation of your legs burning, your lungs burning, and starting to work out some of the kinks that are hard to replicate in practice."

No. 2 Stanford won both Varsity Eight races and split the Fours, with the Beavers winning the Varsity Four. This is the second consecutive year that the Beavers have raced the Cardinal over the 2,000-meter course down Belmont Channel to the end of the Redwood Shores Lagoon.

After the official races, each pair of boats went back up the course and raced again over shorter distances to give coaches chances to experiment with combinations.

"Overall, what we're looking for, is them starting to figure out how to execute from round to round," Byrnes said. "It allows us the opportunity to move some kids around, and gives us the opportunity to try out new things internally within each boat and see how that affects them and see if we can find a little bit more speed."

Stanford is coming off a second-place finish in the Pac-12, the nation's strongest conference, and was fourth at the NCAA Championships. The Cardinal plays host to the Pac-12 Invitational on March 28-29, in its first major competition of the spring.

"Ideally, the first weekend you want to have something close to the foundation," Byrnes said. "Right now, we have two eights that are pretty close and we're trying to spend the next couple of weeks figuring out what a top combination would be and what a 2V would be, and then what the fours would end up looking like. It's probably going to take us a month.

"That's generally how it is. There are kids that once you get into the race season will really start to come alive. That's sort of what we're seeing now. And you have to create a culture where they have that opportunity and know that they have that opportunity.

Whatever happened today, it's going to be completely different groups, boatings a month from now. And the boatings two months from now are going to be drastically different as well."

The results at this point aren't crucial, but the Cardinal is back in the water. And that's the important thing.

"To be able to line up against a team from the Pac-12 means everything to us," Byrnes said. "Everything, all the training in the fall and the winter, it all starts to mean something."

Results:

Varsity 8: Stanford 6:39.04, OSU 6:50.92.
Second Varsity 8: Stanford 6:44.08, OSU 7:04.25.
Varsity 4: OSU 7:33.62, Stanford 7:35.91.
Second Varsity 4: Stanford 7:44.03, OSU 7:59.77.