Despite not being able to practice all week on the Warrior River due to weather, Alabama’s women’s rowing team swept all 10 of its races Saturday at the Big 12 Double Dual at Melton Hill Lake in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The sweep comes a week after Alabama collected three gold medals and a bronze medal in five competitions last weekend in the Sarasota Invitational.
Head coach Larry Davis was thrilled with his team’s performance, though he can stills see some room for improvement.
“Overall it was a good solid team performance with the potential for even more speed improvement,” Davis said. “It was good to sweep a double dual meet, especially with us not being able to have much water time this week with the river conditions in Tuscaloosa. Because of that, I think we probably didn’t pick up as much boat speed as I would have liked but we came out and were very competitive against some of our conference opponents.”
Alabama faced West Virginia in the morning session and Old Dominion in the afternoon session, except for the Second Varsity 4+ races, where Alabama faced off against West Virginia and Tennessee in both sessions.
Alabama won the majority of their races decisively, except for a close finish against Old Dominion in the First Varsity 8+, as it won by .2 seconds (6:47.0 to 6:47.2) in that race.
Even though it won all five of their morning session races, Alabama was still able to improve on their times for afternoon session.
Davis has high expectations for his team the rest of the season, if it keeps doing what they have been doing so far.
“We can be in the mix this year but we’ll certainly have to keep building our speed,” Davis said looking ahead to this year’s Big 12 Championships. “We should be in the hunt for what we want to do to move up in the conference. It won’t be easy but I think races like today show that as a team that we are further along than we have been past few years.”
Alabama will get the next week off before it heads to Dallas on Saturday April 22. The Crimson Tide will face off against Southern Methodist University and Tulsa in its final race before the Big 12 Championships May 12-13.
