Life around the Charles River has strayed from the norm this fall. Just a little bit, certainly. But it’s enough to note a change. The leaves remain, clinging to the trees and their green coating after a September that refused to give up on summer. And for Lauren Priest, the rowing success from last year has returned. But things are a little less comfortable these days. Not that that’s a bad thing.
Hers has been an autumn of a steady process of chiseling at nerves. This fall, Boston University women’s rowing coach Holly Hatton, in her 11th year at BU, implemented a new style of coaching, a style focused on individual contests to see who can “move boats.” It’s a style Hatton learned coaching the Olympic rowing team, and one that hangs added weight on practice psyche.
But when Priest crossed the finish line of the Single event at the Princeton Chase (at Lake Carnegie in Princeton) this weekend, with her boat gliding after a first-place pace, she could finally take a breath.
Her first-place finish led an array of success in small-boat events for the Terriers, who haven’t done much of any other sort of racing this fall. Six other BU rowers finished in the top three in the small boat races. But, in a twist that surprised even Hatton, the women put together a fifth-place finish in the Open Eight and fourth in the Open Four, the latter being their best finish ever in the event at Princeton.
A top-20 team in every year that Hatton has coached, the women have shot out to one of their best fall seasons in recent years, building up more and more momentum to carry them into the spring, their main season.
Hatton’s coaching style this fall lends itself to competitiveness, individual motivation and madness – especially for someone like Priest, who spends her time either fastened to a boat or a book, as a Sargent College Honor Society member.
“It’s mentally more tough [than regular practice],” she said. “You can’t really have a bad practice. You’re constantly racing and the boats are constantly changing. It was always exhausting.”
For the month leading up to the Head of the Charles on Oct. 22-23, the women danced around from pairing to pairing, racing mainly in two-person boats directed by the coaches’ whim that day.
“It’s very difficult to separate people rowing the [eight-person boat],” Hatton said. “When you do rowing in pairs, it really defines people … it boiled down who the boat-movers were. In a larger boat, there’s so much that can prevent an individual from doing well or not doing well. When we do racing in pairs, they’re in control of their fate.
“You just let the cream rise to the top.”
So the women attacked the water, five days a week. And as the weather hardened, so did they. Difficult at first, the women warmed to the idea of constant competition, Hatton said.
“It put everybody in a more competitive mood to defend position or gain ground,” Hatton said.
But perils do arise in paired rowing, which Hatton said is the toughest discipline in the sport. Aside from the possibility of tipping the boat and diving into the world of dark wonder that is the Charles River (a problem solved by pairing experienced small boat rowers with the inexperienced), small-boat rowing also, in effect, splits up the larger boats into “four pairs rowing in an eight,” according to Hatton.
“It’s a gamble [to focus on small- boats],” Hatton said. “I’ve tried to do this in the past in smaller increments. But we decided to really stick with it and give it a full month, and so we were pretty nervous at Head of the Charles because we barely spent time in the eight.
“It’s like driving an SUV in relation to a Triumph,” she continued. “It wasn’t going very well [before Head of the Charles]. They couldn’t get the feel of the boat because it’s so much faster.”
But, for the second straight weekend, the ignition turned. And they were off.
When the women entered the final stretch at Princeton, their pace put them around three places better than they finished, Hatton said. A headwind drove the small-in-stature team back, but took away none of the reason to be optimistic for the rest of the year.
“It was great to get back and win, but the main event was the Eight, and the single was an afterthought,” Priest said.
“Our team’s coming together year more than other years,” she continued. “So, with everyone focused, we could jump to the next level.”
For the men, the focus hasn’t wavered a whole lot. After a spring that brought them the Keller Award in the Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges, for the league’s most improved team, they lost no speed.
Sticking with their strength in the big boats, the Heavyweight Eights finished sixth out of 38 teams, a little over five seconds off the pace of second-place Yale University. But Princeton blew ahead of everyone, finishing almost 24 seconds ahead of Yale.
“We’re right in there with the other ones,” said men’s coach Rodney Pratt. “We started right behind Navy [which finished ninth], but we got held up and it cost us a bit. But we’re right in there, and that’s good. Especially for the spring.”
Very little has managed to hold up the Fours teams, though. After tearing through the Head of the Charles, both the ‘A’ and ‘B’ Heavyweight Fours took second and sixth, respectively, at Princeton.
They’ll lead the Terriers into the Foot of the Charles on Nov. 19, when smaller boats reign.
“We want to take that one away from Harvard,” Pratt said. “We were second last year.”
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