By Mike Albanese

The Alabama women’s rowing team continued their streak of successful racing last weekend, finishing third overall at the Southern Intercollegiate Rowing Championship.

The Tide finished with three top-two finishes, including a gold medal.

This comes on the heels of closing out the home schedule with three first place finishes out of five races over the University of Oklahoma and Old Dominion University on April 3.

“I thought everyone rowed aggressive races,” said head coach Larry Davis. “The crews that did the absolute best jobs were our varsity four and our varsity eight’s.” Davis said that even though his team performed well, they could have been faster off the start and cleaner with their blade work in the last 500 meters.

At the Southern Intercollegiate Rowing Championship, the Crimson Tide won gold in the Varsity 4 race with a time of 8:06.1, edging out the University of Tulsa.  The Varsity 4 squad also won the preliminary race to advance to the grand finals. The first and second Novice 8 teams finished with a silver medal. The first team, who put up a time of 7:20.1, finished second behind Indiana University. The second team raced to a time of 7:34.5 behind Oklahoma University who captured the top spot. “Overall we did achieve some of our goals,” Davis said. “Anytime you can finish in the top three with the competition in the Southern Intercollegiate championship that’s a good overall team performance but we still have things we want to accomplish and still aren’t completely satisfied with.” Even though Davis said ees room for improvement for his team, it is hard to overlook the success his squad has had dating back to March.

On March 15, the Tide swept Kansas State University to open the spring semester. Five days later, they captured silver, bronze and two first-place finishes at Clemson University with victories over the University of Purdue.

Shortly after on March 27, they won two races over the University of Tennessee and the University of Louisville.

Due to the lack of training on the water because of weather related issues, he credits the success of his team for there on-land training.

Even though he said the only way to get fast is to train on water, but the training and focus his team has done on land has benefited them even though they haven’t had adequate time training on the water.

Up next for the Tide is the University of Central Florida Regatta in Orlando, Fla., on May 1 with UCF and the University of Miami racing in the event.

Davis sees this event as an opportunity to gauge where his team is at heading toward the final event of the season.

“We’re looking to be able to improve on our performance when we go down to Florida,” he said. “We’re expecting that to be a spring board in gauge how we’ve done as far as making corrections and things we like to do better, when we got ourselves set up for the last race of the season, the South-Central Rowing Championship.”