..history..

varsity men's lightweight 8+ (1997)
by David "Guery Jones" Jimenez

It all started innocently enough for me.  I was sitting around the dorm one day my freshman year, when Charles Reed and Dana McAlhany came around recruiting for the crew team.  Not knowing anything about rowing except that it could obviously produce such marvelous physiques such as the ones I saw before me, I thought I'd go see what it was all about.  They talked it up well, and asked me if I had ever done any sports before, and if wanted to row or cox.  Hahaha. Weighing in at a mighty 112 pounds, little did I know that my fate had already been decided.  Stupid rowers.

So, the varsity team had a shortage of coxswains, and I was pulled up from the novice team almost immediately.  Coach Rob pretty much showed me which end was the stern, which was the bow, and that it was better to make the shell move towards the stern rather than the bow as fast as possible.  That, and a confidence-inspiring, "Oh yeah, I almost forgot, Gary.  Don't wreck it."  That was the end of my formal training and the beginning of a season of fast rowing and even faster women (Cliff).

Things were going along okay up to spring break.  I still didn't really understand what I had gotten into or what the expectations were for this team.  Things started to click in PC, people started to hit together, and the boat started moving faster.  I started to learn what it was I was supposed to do besides not wreck, thanks especially to the infinite patience of Dan Carroll and Kelly Williamson.

Our first race was at Clemson, in choppy water, with Rob and a couple of officials riding in the launch behind me the whole way to make sure I didn't do too much to kill the boat or some rowers.  I didn't, and we even walked away with a silver medal.  The next week at Atlanta Rowing Festival we did well again, placing first in the light 8 event, and second in the open 8.  Keep in mind that this is the same lineup for both races, 8 lightweights and cox.  The open race was a close one, in more ways than one.  The winner was determined by not more than a couple of seats, and at the point where the course turned slight left, we were no more than about 3 inches off of Clemson's blades.  Clemson had the inside lane, and we were RIGHT NEXT to them.  All the while, I'm scared out of my mind, just trying to make a beeline for  the finish and not kill anyone in the process, and say some of that motivational stuff that I'd been told rowers like, and tell them where we were, and tell them where everyone else was.  Amazingly enough, we never clashed blades.  I attribute this to Cliff "The Bitch" Cantrell and Zack "I Want a Beer" Reed pulling harder on port when they saw how terrible my steering was.

The next week we went to ACCs in Raleigh.  The Light 8 was a relatively easy race.  We were able to pull out in front at the start and settle at a low rate for the last half of the race.  The entire time, Mike Smith was telling me to steer to port.  But I was right, the other coxswains were wrong.  Curvature had allowed Mike to see all of the other boats, and how they were just rowing straight to the docks, realizing that to chase us was an exercise in futility.  The Open 8 event was a different matter, though.  By this time of day, it was raining, cold and miserable.  So we pull up to the starting area, only to have to wait for five or ten minutes for Duke to show up.  Once the race started, Duke took off, since they were still warm and every other crew on the water was cold.  By the 1000 meter mark, we were still down to both Duke and Clemson by about half to three-quaarters of a length.  But as everyone who has ever rowed for Rob knows, "GTCrew OWNS the third 500."  We started pulling up.  Bit by bit.  Now, the finish line at Raleigh is slightly staggered, so by the last 500 it was difficult to say who was ahead, and as a novice coxswain, this made it difficult for me to tell exactly how far we had to go.  Rob had told me to call the pop between 100 and 200 meters to go, depending on how the race was going.  Since it was such a tight race, I called the pop with what I thought was about 200 meters to go.  WRONG.  I didn't count the strokes, but later on Millard told me that he didn't mind such a long sprint, but next time I should let him know that I want him to pop for 28 strokes.  In any case, it was a very close finish, and nobody knew who had won, not even spectators or officials on shore.  So we had to wait through the entire awards ceremony to find out, much to the surprise of even the announcer, that we had won both the Light and Open 8.

SIRAs was an equally intense race.  The final field that day for the Light 8 included Marietta, Michigan State, UTC, all tough schools.  At the beginning of the second 500, all I said was "Get on your bikes and ride!" For those of you who know Queen, we used to listen to "Fat Bottomed Girls" on the way to practice EVERY day.  I've never seen people in such pain look so happy.  We won this race with open water, and a new catch phrase had been coined.

This year, we decided to go to the Champion Regatta rather than Vails for what Rob decided was better competition.  Despite a tremendous effort on our part we were unable to quite come up with the .3 seconds it took to beat a very fast Boston College team in the finals.  It was a great disappointment to all of us, especially after such a good season and with the high expectations we had of ourselves.  However, we decided within the next couple of days that it would be worth it to go to IRAs in Camden, which were to be held about 3 weeks later.  Crew at Georgia Tech isn't easy for anyone with the kind of classwork that this school demands.  However, many people sacrificed a great deal of their time over the next few weeks to get the work done early that would enable them to go to this regatta, which was held the weekend before finals. 

We stepped up the training, expecting the level of competition there to be higher.  We had no idea how much more.  In the heats, Harvard (Shakespeare readers-thereof, as Jonathan Snow called them) and the other Ivies pulled away at a blinding pace and continued to steadily pull away throughout the race.

In the petit finals, we finished third to MIT and Dartmouth, beating every other club team there. 

So, the season, while not perfect, had come to a satisfying close.  I started out knowing nothing about rowing.  The eight rowers who had made it into the fastest boat Tech had produced to date, Gil "Mr Boat Average" Nowell, Josh "The Freshman" Vose, Jeremy "Regulator" Hutcherson, Zack "I Want a Beer" Reed, Steve "Old Man" Georgalis, Cliff "The Bitch" Cantrell, Marcus "Ducky" Millard, and Michael "Smitty" Smith, had shown me what it was to give 100% effort, by giving everything they had and doing whatever it took to become a champion, a lesson I will carry with me forever.