STANFORD, Calif. -- How do you evaluate a season that barely happened?
The Stanford women's rowing team competed once in the fall and once in the spring before the COVID-19 pandemic ended its season two weeks before the Cardinal was to host the Pac-12 Invitational at Redwood Shores.
Stanford was ranked No. 2 when the season was canceled, receiving three of the 25 first-place votes in the coaches' association poll. In 2019, Stanford placed second at the Pac-12 Championships and was fourth at the NCAA Championships.
The Cardinal opened at the Head of the Charles on October 20, 2019, in Boston, and repeated as collegiate champion of the Championship Eights on the Charles River.
Placing third overall to a pair of USRowing boats, Stanford finished the three-mile course in 15:24.784, more than four seconds ahead of Yale for the collegiate crown and nearly 19 seconds behind the top U.S. boat with essentially the same personnel who raced in this summer's World Championships.
In the Championship Fours, Stanford was third overall and third among collegians, clocking 17:46.662.
The spring season opened in drizzly conditions with a home dual on March 7, 2020, against Oregon State, winning three of the four races.
Stanford won both Varsity Eight races and split the Fours.
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.
"Ideally, the first weekend you want to have something close to the foundation," coach Derek Byrnes said afterward. "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."
Unfortunately, that opportunity didn't come in 2020, but the Cardinal looks forward to continuing its rise as a program in 2021.