Last Saturday, men’s crew traveled to Saratoga Springs to compete in the Little Three Championship. While the regatta, as the name suggests, used to feature the Ephs competing against both the Wesleyan Cardinals and the Amherst Mammoths, the competition is effectively a dual meet between the Ephs and the Cardinals as the Mammoths have rarely participated since restructuring their varsity rowing program into a club sport in the early 1990s.
Heading into the weekend, the Ephs knew Wesleyan would be a fierce competitor. Last spring, the Ephs swept the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Div. III National Championship, and Wesleyan placed just behind the Ephs in second place. However, while the Ephs graduated nearly half of the members of their champion 1 and 2vs, the Cardinals have retained almost all of the members of their runner-up crews, upping the ante at last weekend’s championship.
The start of last weekend’s regatta was not auspicious. Due to difficult weather conditions, Williams’ and Wesleyan’s coaches decided the regatta would be run in two heats rather than individual heats for the 1vs, 2vs, 3vs, and 4vs. The 1v and 2v races were combined into one heat, and the 3v and 4v into another. Even with the modification, the conditions caused the start times of the races to be pushed over an hour past the original schedule — time the crews spent on the water rowing amid rain, gusts, and frigid temperatures. “Before the race had even started, we had rowed about the same length we would row in a normal practice,” Michael LesStrang ’26 said.
In the first heat of the regatta, featuring the Ephs’ and Cardinals’ 1v and 2v, the Cardinals’ 1v crossed the finish line first with a time of 6:39.13, followed by the Eph 2v at 6:43.04, the Eph 1v at 6:46.87, and the Cardinal 2v at 6:48.48.
Though the Ephs’ 1v made a number of technical breakthroughs in the preceding week of practice thanks to high levels of intensity and focus, Saturday’s race did not go as the crew hoped, according to LesStrang, 5 seat for the 1v. “We weren’t staying true to the way that we rowed in practice, and I think we got a little bit in our own heads,” he said. “Saturday was the sort of day where the pressure and expectations got the better of us, and we didn’t perform at the level we know we’re capable of performing at.”
For the Ephs’ 2v, however, the race was a success. Nyamekye Akosah ’25, 4 seat of the boat, credited the success in part to the previous week’s lamentable training conditions. “After the training and the conditions we’d been through this week on [Lake] Onota, it wasn’t actually that different — just a lot colder,” he said. “I think our comfort in those rather mediocre conditions really helped us through.” Akosah also commended stroke seat Myer Liebman ’26 for his composure throughout the race.
The call by 2v coxswain Carina Sun ’26 that the 2v had overlapped the 1v — a feat the boat had not achieved at the practices preceding the race — gave the 2v the momentum it needed to pull ahead in the race, according to Akosah.
“When we started the race, it was a game of cat and mouse between us and the Wesleyan 2v: We would be ahead by a few seats, they would take some back, we would respond and regain our lead, but by the 1000 meter mark there was a real shift in energy in the boat as we broke away from the Wesleyan 2v and Carina announced that we had overlap with our 1v,” Akosah said of the exciting race. “We spent all of our practices in the past week trying to unlock our second gear, and that call by Carina did it — it went from us racing the Wesleyan 2v to us racing our 1v,” he continued. “You could feel the excitement going throughout the boat as we realized we had a chance to do something we hadn’t been able to ever do at practice — beat the 1v.”
In the regatta’s second heat, the Ephs’ 3v came out on top with a time of 6:53.49, followed by the Cardinals’ 3v at 6:58.36, the Ephs’ 4v at 7:00.27 and the Cardinals’ 4v with a 7:07.16.
3v coxswain Christina Zhang ’27 expressed her satisfaction with her boat’s relentless grit amid grueling conditions. “Having a boat that is truly committed and understands that we can have a bad stroke and then recover on the next one was really important, especially in this race,” she said.
Vaughn Sanders ’26, 7 seat of the 4v, said he was happy with his boat’s performance as well. “We held very well with the Wesleyan 3V, at one point we were even with them, and we won against the 4V by a larger margin than we did last year,” he said. “It was overall a great race.”
Next weekend, the Ephs will round out their regular season with their first home regatta of the spring as they take on Tufts, Hamilton, and the MIT Lightweights on Lake Onota.
“A lot of us feel like we have big shoes to fill, and we know we can do it,” LesStrang said, reflecting on the legacy left behind by the immense success of the men’s crew program in recent years. “While it is obviously unfortunate to not go into every race being ranked No. 1, it provides a chip on our shoulder that we didn’t have last year and that I think makes us a little hungrier and a little tougher as we approach the second half of the season.”
