April 23, 2004

Throughout the season, members of the UNC rowing team will provide TarHeelBlue.com readers with an inside look at the Carolina program and the experience of being a varsity athlete at North Carolina. This installment, the 15th of the 2003-04 school year, is by Amanda Snow, a sophomore from Efland, N.C.

Not one minute of last week was spent without thoughts of walking through Duke, Clemson, or even Virginia. Every stroke during practice was taken with heart and power in hopes of making us the fastest Carolina crew in quite a few years. The two varsity boats had worked through so many problems and were rowing better than they had all year. This made the defeat at ACC's even more crushing. It is hard to see all of your hard work go out the window. Many teams experience a loss instead of that win that they wanted so badly, but how is this loss different from all of the rest?

Our team has the strength to take that loss as more fuel for the fire. We KNOW that we are supposed to be up there with those other crews, and this week we are working out way toward that goal yet again. No longer do the same old excuses of slower boats, less money and fewer recruits make us feel like we deserved the loss. We have decided that we are tired of excuses and that no matter what, we don't want to be losers.

This week we tested ourselves one last time individually on the erg in a 2k test on Monday and a 6k test on Wednesday. These tests, the last of the year, make us see that we are stronger than we think we are. Just when you think that you can't finish a piece, someone starts to count a power ten, or the person next to you brings their split down, or you realize that you only have another two strokes to get you through the next 1,000 meters and you see that split fall and the meters count down faster, and you convince yourself that you can do it.

That teamwork and looking to each other for the strength to go on is what is going to allow us to prevail at Dad Vails in Philadelphia and Centrals in Tennessee. Centrals is the race where we see not only our good old ACC rivals, but other teams that we are very close to. We are all counting down the days until we get to show everyone what we have really got to bring to the table. This time we will combine all of our individual power and do it as a team, the Carolina rowing team, and I think that we will surprise everyone there.