January 27, 1999

The University of North Carolina crew team acquired a couple of new boats over the summer, which gave coach Joel Furtek plenty of time to ponder the program's first season. The new hulls, you see, came from New Haven, Conn., and the oars to go with them came from Durham, N.H., which meant a 50-hour round-trip from Chapel Hill. "I love drives like that because the phone can't ring and there's no paperwork to be done," says Furtek, who made the journey alone, towing the boat trailer behind a Chevy truck and bedding down in the truck's backseat at night. "That drive was a great opportunity to reflect on what had already happened for our team and plan for the season ahead."

This is what had already happened: In its first season as a varsity sport, the 28th at North Carolina, the Tar Heel rowing team earned a Southern Championship, a Central Region Championship and, most impressively, an NCAA bronze medal. Certainly those are amazing accomplishments for a first-year team, but Furtek found himself less-than-satisfied while roaring up I-95. The team had surpassed the goals it set back in September of 1997, at the start of the inaugural season, but had not met the new goal it set in March, which was to send an eight to the NCAA championship. The team fell just short, sending a four. That boat's third-place performance gave the team incentive to work even harder. "The fact that we got to taste the NCAA's is really motivating," says senior Lucienne Papon, who competed in the bronze-medal boat. "We rowed with the best of the best and there were a lot of athletes and programs there that we were really impressed with."

Carolina headed into its second season with much higher goals. Furtek, however, didn't have a lot of say in the matter. "Last year, I was telling them what to expect of themselves," he says. "This year it's the opposite. Now I'm asking them, what do we expect? What are our goals?"

At one of the team's weekly meetings, on a September evening just before the first full practice of the fall, the 26 varsity rowers gathered to answer those questions. They sat in a circle on the floor and spent 90 minutes hashing out just how bold their goals should be. Very bold, it turned out: They would shoot to reach the 1999 NCAA championships as a team, which only the top ten crews in the country will do. (Beyond the top 10, schools can qualify to send single boats, which is what Carolina did in 1998.) "It's going to be a lot of work," sophomore Dana Peirce says, "but if we're not shooting that high, what are we doing?"

This season's team began at a starting line much different than last year's, when none of the rowers had collegiate varsity experience. "Last year, no one knew what to expect," says coxswain Sam Hermitte, a senior. "We didn't know each other and we didn't have a sense of the competition. We were at the bottom of a huge learning curve. Now that we have a year of experience, we have a better sense of what's a realistic goal, or maybe what's unrealistic but worth shooting for."

The crew proved in fall competition that it is close to claiming a place among the nation's elite. On Oct. 18, UNC finished 16th of 59 varsity eights at Boston's Head of the Charles regatta, one of the biggest and most prestigious races in the world. The Tar Heels placed 11th among collegiate boats in the three-mile race, beating established programs like University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Rutgers and Cornell.

Next, in a weekend of competition at Lake Lanier in Gainesville, Ga., the Tar Heels claimed the overall points trophy at the Nov. 7 Head of the Chattahoochee regatta and won every event they entered at the Nov. 8 Chattahoochee Chase, several by dramatically large margins. UNC closed out its fall season with a strong showing at the Head of the Rivanna regatta in Charlottesville, Va., where the Tar Heels competed well against national powers like Virginia and Princeton.

The program grew in another significant way during the fall. An alumna, Kay Knight Clarke, Class of 1960, donated funding to start a sculling program and UNC began competing in the smaller, one or two-person boats. As a part of the rowing program, sculling should enhance training for fours and eights and help the athletes prepare to compete in elite sculling. Furtek also hopes it will bolster the presence of sculling on the collegiate level. (In sculls, each rower is controlling two oars, one on each side of the boat. In sweeps, each rower controls one oar on hulls that have a total of two, four or eight oars. Boats are commonly referred to as "fours" or "eights", based on the number of oars they have.)

Regardless of the type of boat, the Tar Heels' training and competition this season will all be pointed toward Sacramento, Calif., site of the 1999 NCAA Championships, May 28-30. The team will compete six times, from San Diego, Calif., to Chapel Hill, prior to the NCAA's. Local races are the Atlantic Coast Collegiate Championships April 10 in Raleigh and the Carolina Classic April 24 in Chapel Hill.

In addition to six practice sessions on the water each week and three weight room workouts, the team spends time rowing on dry land on ergometers, also known as rowing machines. Even that training is geared toward the NCAA's, with a goal of rowing an extra four million meters, roughly the distance from Chapel Hill to Sacramento, in addition to regular workouts on the machines this spring. "When you break it down, it's only about 20 minutes per person per day," Papon says. "It's definitely a commitment, but it keeps our eyes focused on reaching the NCAA's.

"It's a tough goal, but there was no other goal for us to have. We're at Carolina."

By Dana Gelin
Assistant Director of Athletic Media Relations