Rowing is about crossing the line before the other crews. That is who wins. It is certainly possible to put a spin on not winning and to celebrate accomplishment for crews which do better than expected or better than the norm set by previous crews from their own program. Not winning is not necessarily losing: if a crew which does not win has rowed its best race, then the members of that crew are hardly losers. Losing is something active - it means that the crew has actively performed below its potential and has lost. But if a crew does its best and fails to win because the other crew is simply better, it has been beaten but can still take pride in its performance. But does it really need a championship of its own?
There used to be a simple hierarchy to championships. There was Eastern Sprints, the championship for all the traditional large (Div. I) eastern programs, with special midwestern guest Wisconsin (since Wisco was the only Div. I program in the midwest and it seemed fair to invite it east to race against equivalent programs. There was an equivalent Div. I championship on the west coast. And then there were regional championships (New Englands, for small New England programs; Mid-Westerns, won every year by Wisco; and so forth). But there was no National Championship at the top level.
All the non-Division I programs were covered by Dad Vails. I'm not sure if "Div. I" had a satisfactory definition, but everyone seemed to know that it referred to the size and strength of the rowing program. Div. I did not mean to rowers what Div. I meant to most other sports - it's not the size of the university, after all, but the strength and financial backing behind the program. And results could get a program promoted from Vails to Sprints. I remember hearing Vails described as the Div. III national championship regatta, although why there was no Div. II was beyond me and everyone else I knew.
As I described in my letter from last May, Dad Vails is a nice regatta but it has many inherent flaws. First of all there is the race course. Sometime in the 1950s the race got stuck in Philadelphia and will probably never leave. Nothing good can be said about that course as a venue for championship racing: its main problems are a bend (causing a staggered start of four seats per lane) and an unclear finish. This year, the worst one-day rainfall in Philadelphia=s recorded history came down on the first day of Vails and caused the regatta's second day (semi-finals and finals) to be cancelled - the river was running too fast, some of the stake boats had washed away, and debris had become entangled in the buoy lines, making the whole course unsafe. I feel bad for the organizers, because they do indeed put their hearts into the regatta and go out of their way to make it a good experience, and there was nothing they could do about the weather. Oxford readers of this letter can appreciate the annual winter floods that perennially curtail Torpids and have cut into so many other events over the years.
Astute web-surfers may notice that there were indeed "final" results from Vails this year. This was a mini-regatta for those crews which opted to stay an extra day on the off-chance that conditions would improve. They did, obviously, enough to run some races. But two-thirds of the crews had by then cleared off, leaving only Philadelphia-area crews, crews which had traveled in from so far that were going to need to go back the next day anyway, and crews which were not in the middle of their colleges' final exam periods. The races must also have been a bit of a circus: a 1500 meter course which had no buoys to mark the lanes (most crucial coming around the bend), off a floating start which still had its four-seat stagger. I do not even want to imagine being the starter and trying to align six crews across in a fast stream, with the crews drifting quickly towards a bridge, and trying to line up a stagger without reference points. And need I mention that with the amount of stream that was coming down the crews in the middle lanes would have been floating faster than the ones on the outside?
A Div. II did indeed form in the early 1990s, again as I described in my letter from last May, and several crews did peal off to attend the Champion International Collegiate Rowing Championships. It should be noted that "Champion International" is not some glorified title, but is rather the name of the paper company which has generously sponsored and supported the regatta since its inception.
The regatta formed to address issues such as having a proper racecourse. It also dealt with one other issue I hadn't considered last year: Dad Vails is way too big. With over a hundred colleges, Dad Vails has all sorts of events. This gives it no flexibility for delays. It gives it lots of heats which it cannot seed properly which leads to imbalanced heats, made worse when Dad Vails fails to account for scratches and ends up with 6 crew in one heat, 5 in two more, 4 in three two more, and 3 in another, with three to qualify from each, or when it comes up with some bizarre progressions from heat to rep to semi. And it has no time to add petit or third-level finals. Champion invites only a set number of crews at the Div II level, seeds them, and then runs petit and third-level finals. And it focuses on the eights without all the random small boats (except for one inexplicable women's varsity four).
Champion has this year begun to grapple with eligibility questions. It was felt that the time had come for several programs which used Champion as their championship should move on. That was because many of the programs which attend Champion have over the years achieved varsity status within their universities, and if they came from large universities (essentially what other sports referred to as Div. I), then that meant they had an inherent advantage over the remaining programs, which were mostly varsity-status programs from small colleges or club-status programs. If a fully-funded varsity-status program from a large college remained at Champion, it was, the logic went, pot-hunting. These programs were encouraged to move on to Div. I. Some complained they wouldn=t be competitive there, but if not then the problem was not because they couldn't but because they weren't going about things right. It turned into a moot point when Champion, wanting to be accommodating, after all, left several holes in its definitions of programs to be excluded and several of the programs it wanted to exclude called out the lawyers to slip through the holes. It will be interesting to see what happens next year.
Of course, should these programs which Champion hopes will remove themselves move up to Div. I, they would make the existing structure of Sprints unwieldy. That, in turn, might necessitate yet another championship.
Everyone I have spoken to who has attended Champion has come away pleased that the regatta has satisfactorily addressed all the problems with Vails which led to its founding. By allowing only crews which qualify to attend, it is not the come-on-come-all of Dad Vails. But now that it has successfully defined its lower limit, it struggles to define its upper limit. Champion also has another issue which has caused some complaints: yes, the ever-elusive racecourse. In even years, the regatta takes place on Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester, Mass. While this is a great venue (I have many fond memories of that racecourse from high school and college), it does have one major problem: if the wind is just right, it is not fair. In a cross-headwind from lane one, as existed this year for both Champion and men's Eastern Sprints (which is always held there), lane one is protected for the first 1000 meters, and the other lanes are exposed. In the final 1000 meters, the further away from lane one, the worse the wind. I have even seen an admittedly rare cross-head from lane six, which leaves lane six protected down the course and kills lane one. The latter example happened once when I was in college and caused something close to a 6-5-4-3-2-1 finish for five consecutive races at men's Sprints before racing was suspended until the wind died down (some good crews could overcome the wind to a certain extent, but the race which resulted in the temporary suspension of racing was a heavily-favored crew in lane 3 getting bounced out of the medals by crews it had crushed all year). Generally, though, Worcester is a fair course - this cross-head does not happen to this extreme that often, and few courses are always perfect.
Worcester is porbably the best course in New England. Women's Sprints get held on Lake Waramaug in New Preston, Connecticut, which is a pleasant location and usually has good conditions (although at this year's Sprints, the bit from 200 to 700 was apparently barely rowable, and one boat even sank). The main problem with Lake Waramaug, though, is that the site dates back to the days when women's rowing didn't race over 2000 meters. The longest distance available, then, is only 1950 meters, and even then crews have to hold hard on the finish line. So this is not an acceptable alternative, and it is unclear why Women's Sprints even stays there.
Champion began in Worcester because its largest constituency comes from New England. In odd years, Champion moves to another site outside New England, to accommodate non-New England crews. In 1997, that meant Gainesville, Georgia, site of the 1996 Olympics. Word was that the site was excellent and conditions perfect, but considering that few southern crews actually attend Champion, the site was considered way out of the way. Indeed, I found it a bit disconcerting to be driving to Dad Vails last year out of the South, and to pass a bunch of trailers from New England heading the other way. The Mid-Atlantic region will likely benefit from the compromise site next year.
Then there was the Intercollegiate Rowing Association championship, which could variably claim national championship status. The problem with IRAs was that the regatta was invented to conflict with the Harvard-Yale heavyweight race by a bunch of other eastern programs. With Harvard and Yale absent, assuming that one or both of the crews were good in a given year, the IRAs could not really act as a national championship. Since the west coast programs did not always attend, it was really just Eastern Sprints without two programs. So, depending on the year, the IRA victor might have had a claim to be national champion, but generally Sprints was the big race. The IRA has changed substancially in the last few years, though.
Without a true national championship, the west coast programs got a little annoyed that they did not have the chance to take on the best of the east, leaving the Eastern Sprints champion to claim all the glory. The critique was fair enough. So a regatta was founded in Cincinatti in the early-1980s. Various problems with that regatta led to its subsequent abandonment. The men's lightweight crews were the first to stay away from Cinci, and they ended up adopting the IRAs as the venue for their nationals. When the IRAs moved to Camden, New Jersey - a far better course that the one in Syracuse, New York, where the IRAs had been held since the 1950s, the other boat classes soon followed suit. Finally, a couple of years ago, the IRAs could legitimately claim the status of national championship for all events (at least all events in eights - the important boats - in the categories it supports: for men and women, first and second varsity heavyweight, first varsity lightweight, and first freshman/novice heavy). Although the regatta still includes crews from all the member programs of the Intercollegiate Rowing Association whether they are fast or not as well as a few guest crews from smaller programs which wanted the experience (often the top finishers from Champion and Dad Vails), all the potential claimants for the national title started attending.
Last year, however, the NCAA took over women's rowing. By this time I am sure I do not need to introduce the NCAA to foreign readers. Well, heaven forbid that the NCAA hold its national championship in conjunction with everyone else. So the NCAA has moved the varsity heavyweight events to another regatta (since it does not recognize the lightweight and novice categories, the national championships for these events remain with the men's at the IRAs).
The format of the NCAA Championship is also curious. Teams are divided by region, not by their natural competition classes. Teams are also ranked for overall performance within their region (somehow the results of all of their crews get taken into account to give them a "team" ranking on top of the rankings for the individual crews). I have yet to discern what this "team" ranking means, but somehow it leads to crews being invited to the NCAA Championships. Finally, out go the invitations: 16 first boats, 8 second boats, and 16 fours.
What bizarre numbers, considering the regatta is run along the standard six-lane format. I am told that the numbers 16 and 8 were probably picked so that rowing could correspond with NCAA championships in other sports, none of which operate 6-lane formats. But this is rowing, and 18 and 12 would make more sense.
It also appears that the NCAA has placed a cap on the number of invited crews (presumably because it feels the need to foot the bill - which is self-justification akin to the European Union taking credit for building projects in member states which may or may not be in the best interests of those member states and which paid the EU in the first place - nothing is "free," especially if someone else sets the rules with your money). If that is the case, then to achieve 18 varsities and 12 second varsities would require cutting back on the number of fours. As it stands, many of the fours invited are from larger programs' third varsities, others come from programs which are too small to field eights or which choose to stack a four, and still others come from a selection of freshmen. The event is certainly not like versus like - the logic behind why programs all compete in the same boat class - the eight - when they can. If the NCAA wants to have an event for fours, it should either open the event only to small programs which prioritize the four, or go to the other extreme and require that anyone entering the four must also enter both eights. Either way, it would cut down on the number of fours and allow a standard number of eights.
The NCAA's format does not seem to recognize or properly account for the existing shape of rowing in the US, probably because the NCAA is hardly equipped to deal with the sport of rowing in general, but was created to manage the revenue sports. So it should not be surprising that alongside the NCAA take-over has come a trend towards "conference championships" which I alluded to above. Indeed, the NCAA seems to be encouraging these championships. Besides being an extra championship race (again, so that everyone can be champion of something - even the little programs in the small boat classes), these conferences make no sense in connection with rowing, since they are instead football or basketball conferences. Often they do not even reflect the natural division or levels of programs within the sport, and create quite artificial match-ups which have no logic.
Some new championships do have rowing logic - such as New York Metropolitan Championships, or Philadelphia City Championships (with Columbia and Penn excluded, respectively) - but merely add clutter to the schedule and create still more "champions." Indeed, there seem to be more championships these days than normal races.
I think there is something to be said for having one regional championship for each level of rowing (i.e. - New Englands for small New England non-Sprints programs, likewise New York States for all New York crews minus Columbia and Cornell, and so forth for every region with enough programs to support properly-sized championships), and then a national championship for each level (be it IRAs/NCAAs, Champion, or Dad Vail). Certainly it would make sense in rowing, and would allow crews to move up as the balance of power shifts.
There is no Ivy League championship, for example, despite all of those programs competing at the same level within the Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges. The Ivy League does give out all-Ivy awards to the highest-placed Ivy League crew at Eastern Sprints. But I don't think I have ever heard of a second-place crew at Sprints boasting that it was the "Ivy League Champion" nor would it want to - it finished second at Sprints and that's that.
Has this cleared anything up for the unititiated? Probably not. But that's the American sports scene for you. In a nutshell, then, the following crews can call themselves national champions (divisions refer to rowing status, not NCAA divisions):
IRA (last weekend in May) = Div I Champion for: Men: Varsity Heavy, Varsity Light, 2nd Varsity Heavy, Frosh Heavy Women: Varsity Light, Novice Heavy NCAA (last weekend in May) = Div I Champion for: Women: Varsity Heavy, Second Varsity HeavyFor the lower eights, there is no national championship. Often, the winner of the respective events at Sprints (second or third weekend in May) makes the claim on the basis of having the strongest and deepest league - indeed, the only league that regularly has second, third, and even (in the case of Harvard) fourth varsity lightweight crews, third and fourth varsity heavyweight crews (although I haven=t seen a 4VH crew listed in any results for a few years), plus second, third, and fourth freshman heavy and light crews (although, again, I am not aware of anyone but Harvard ever keeping four frosh light crews, and I have not seen many 4FH crews in the results recently). Men's Sprints has a 2F and 3V race for heavy and light eights and sometimes 3F as well. Women's Sprints has a 2N heavy event but long ago gave up on having a full field of 3Vs and turned that into a fours race, often with multiple entries from some programs - which seemed unsatisfactory in many ways. Until recently, Radcliffe (Harvard's women's program) was the only program at this level committed to lightweight women's rowing, so there was no need for lower boat entries there.
Champion (second weekend in May) = Div II Champion for: Men: Varsity Heavy, Varsity Light, Second Varsity Heavy, Frosh Heavy, Frosh Light Women: Varsity Heavy, Varsity Light, Second Varsity Heavy, Novice Heavy Dad Vail (second weekend in May) = Div III Champion for: Men: Varsity Heavy, Varsity Light, Second Varsity Heavy, Frosh Heavy, Frosh Light Women: Varsity Heavy, Varsity Light, Second Varsity Heavy, Novice Heavy, Novice Lightalso includes small-boat events for lower crews and for those programs incapable of supporting eights (this regatta was canceled before the semi-final round this year due to unsafe conditions on the Schuylkill. A mini-regatta was run a day later for those crews able to stick around.)
The Div II and Div III levels rarely have programs large enough to have eights in any other boat classes than those listed, the exception being second freshmen/novice crews, for which there is no national championship, and no way to discern a hierarchy. Some Champion-level programs will enter their second freshmen crews in Dad Vails.
Other important championships:
Eastern Sprints (mid-May: men on one weekend, women on another, alternating each year) = Div IThe most competitive league in the country, the Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges includes virtually all of the Div I programs on the east coast, plus Wisconsin. Traditionally the focal point of competitors' seasons, although the IRA seems to have replaced for those crews with events at IRAs.
Men: VH, VL, 2VH, 2VL, 3VH, 3VL, 1FH, 1FL, 2FH, 2FL, 3FH (sometimes) Women: VH, VL, 2VH, 1NH, 1NL, 2NH, plus 3V 4+s New Englands (first weekend in May) = Div II and some Div IIIThe strongest of the leagues for smaller programs, provides a fair number of Champion aspirants More events than Champion, including some fours events for lower boats and smaller programs.
New York States (first weekend in May) = Div II and Div IIIsimilar to New Englands, but smaller and for New York State.
Mid-Atlantics (first weekend in May) = mostly Div III for nowa relatively new regatta introduced to fill a geographic void. The prohibition before this year on scholarship athletes disqualified most Champion-level competitors in the region - but that ban has been lifted, at least for women. Navy Women (a Sprints program) came this year. A handful of programs are considering making the jump to Div II. Full complement of eights events, but as a Vails-feeder, there are lots of small-boat events for the benefit of small programs.
Mid-Westerns (late-April) = Wisconsin on downWisconsin usually wins most - if not all - of the eights events. Some programs go on to Champion and then a few to Vails, and a bunch that don't even go to Vails.
Southerns (SIRAs) (mid- April) = Div II and III and belowFeeder for Champion at the upper level, many Vails programs, but also contains crews which do not even go to Vails.
Pacific Coast Rowing Championships (mid-May) = all levelsWashington has dominated in recent years, with California (Berkeley) being the only other program of note. As big as Eastern Sprints, but the general failure of crews at this level to be competitive with the eastern programs was what led to Eastern Sprints becoming the focal point of the eastern colleges' season and an ersatz national championship for so many years. Currently, Washington and California men=s heavies are contenders for the IRA crown (Washington won the three heavy eight events last year), and Washington is favored to repeat as NCAA champ in the women's varsity heavy eight. But, with notable exceptions, few western programs have made much of an impression throughout history. Prior to Washington's wins last year, I am not sure when the last time a non-Eastern Sprints program could justifiably claim to be national champion - Cal's men's heavies in 1951 or thereabouts? I am pretty sure that no men's or women's lightweight crew other than from the Eastern Sprints has ever won a national title, and I am believe that was true of the women's heavies as well before last year.
And there it is: a guide to US collegiate championships.
Addendum: Since I wrote this, things got muddled again. The varsity event at IRAs was won by Princeton, which can now presumably call itself "national champion." Washington (2nd at Pacifics), Cal (1st at Pacifics), and Penn (1st at Eastern Sprints) -in that order - rounded out the top four. This could be said to be a pretty representative group. However, Harvard and Yale both stayed away in preparation for their four-mile duel next weekend. Both Harvard and Yale had fast crews this year. In fact, Princeton never beat Harvard this year (Harvard beat Princeton head-to-head in mid-April, and then Harvard finished 2nd to Princeton's 3rd at Sprints). Yale did indeed get splattered by Princeton head-to-head this year and finished fourth at Sprints, although it had beaten Penn earlier in the year. But it was all pretty close in Worcester. While this may eliminate Yale from the mix, I'm not sure what it says about Harvard. Princeton's national championship certainly bears an asterisk - not as undeserved, simply as having been won without ever beating Harvard.
Also about IRAs: the top novice women's crews stayed away, leaving the spoils to Cornell, which had finished 13th at Sprints. No way Cornell can claim a national championship despite what I said above.