Ready, shove

It's only Wednesday and it's been a full week. We're making our final push to get everything set up for the fall season.

Yesterday we moved a majority of the fleet and equipment to the Yacht Club which serves as our "boat house" during the fall season. This club is a fantastic resource for us when fall water levels render the real boat house unusable. A nice surprise this year was them clearing out some additional trailer space for us to store the shell trailer - thus making it a breeze to load by cutting down on transport time - and closing off a space about 200 feet closer to the river for us to store the shells. Last year after a practice the athletes had to trek the shells up a steep hill and while this wasn't that much of a hindrance in terms of ability, it could impact time on the water. Today we should complete the move with the remaining eights and equipment.

We've also been moving launches around to have them serviced and have been running Learn to Erg classes for all incoming novice and working with the steady stream of late comers. It seems like each day we'll pull in two - four new athletes who are looking to get into the sport. It's been a huge blessing because these have all been former athletes who are either burned out with their current sport and have been pushed toward rowing by their coaches or athletes who were simply wanting to try something different. Still, running the class and swim tests and giving the general rundown of how the team operates and it's expectations both as athletes and as students has definitely eaten into the hours we have each day to accomplish everything else.

Still we can feel the season rapidly approaching. Monday will kick off varsity practice with the novices to soon follow. Fall will be short and intense this year with more racing than I've experienced in years and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how all these novice take to this sport.