Welcome home

Today Ryan and I worked on sprucing up the erg room.

During the winter with the river changing levels, I pulled a lot of our equipment out of the boat house and stored it in our erg room. Amongst the items I brought over were the banners that the team had accumulated over the years. I figured that were the worst to happen, at least the program's legacy would be safe.

Because of the location of the boat house, the program's history hasn't exactly been visible unless you frequent the boat house. Even then most of the banners were at the end of the boat house, tucked behind spare equipment, ergs and other parts and pieces. After some figuring, we decided the best thing to do was to deck out the erg room with the banners as both motivation and as free advertising in a way to those who wander by.

The total haul:

* 9 NCRC Championship banners - we're still short 2.
* 3 WIRA banners
* 1 PCRC banner
* 1 Head of the Charles banner - we're short 1.

We had to modify most of the banners and add grommets because they were tacked up at the boat house - a tedious process - but after a couple hours of work, the erg room looks more like an actual erg room. We've discussed the possibility of adding another Head of the Charles banner for the varsity women's four that went a few years ago and placed 5th and we talked about hanging both banners in the main lobby of Sparks so that it drew more attention but for now we're both fairly pleased with the results.

It also felt good to get back to the university today. I've been going stir crazy working on season plans, reading, watching DVDs, etc. I miss being down at the school despite the warmth of the office and am really looking forward to getting down there more often in the next two weeks to finish up some projects and get ready to kick off the spring season.

Oh and I'm not sure why the picture turned out with a green tint. I think the overhead lights were acting up.

Update:

You might notice that one of the banners says, "hampion" instead of "champion." All of these banners are in desperate need of some TLC. Fixing or replacing the banners is on my list of things to do this spring.

Update - again:

After some quick fact checking, it turns out that we are not short 2 NCRC banners. We are short 13. I am not sure what the previous requirement was for getting a banner made but I am a big believer of what you do for one, you do for all meaning that the 2nd Novice Mens Lightweight 4 deserves a banner as much as the Varsity Women's 8 for winning. All this really means is that my job got a little more complicated especially since we're going to have to re-hang all of those banners. That's both exciting - the number of banners - and daunting - because it took us a long time just to hang 9 and now we're adding 13 more.