It is 5:45 a.m. when the alarm sounds, and Brad Kuntscher (CAS ‘05) rolls over to momentarily ignore its incessant screeching. He knows he must get up, so he slowly rolls out of bed, throws on the day-old spandex he left out beside his bed, and jogs out the door towards another morning practice on the Potomac.
For Kuntscher, this was to be a particularly long day. After a night of studying for a test over the din of Comedy Central and Cage Fighting Championships until nearly 1:30 a.m., this junior realized he would have to battle both exhaustion and hunger throughout the day. A lanky 6’2”, this dark-haired rower with a sly smile had already cut his latent weight of around 180-185 lbs. to a meager 170 lbs. Now he was facing a day without eating or drinking to try to reduce his weight to 164 lbs. for the Friday morning weigh-in, knowing well that he would have to then shrink to 160 lbs. a week later. Despite being on the upper realm of his boat’s required 155 lb. average weight, Kuntscher’s weight cutting is necessarily extreme. After a week of eating salads, reduced calorie mini-portion TV dinners and, failing all else, bland low-calorie oatmeal, Kuntscher knew having to cut even those foods for a day would leave him tired and testy. And at six a.m., the day was only beginning.
Such is the life of a Georgetown men’s lightweight rower. While most students would only consider being up before six a.m. to pull an all-nighter for a paper or test, Kuntscher and his teammates on the men’s varsity lightweight crew team rise early as a way of life. The team aims to be rowing on the water before seven every morning, and the time needed to sufficiently wake up and get to the boathouse calls for an even earlier wake-up . The rowers claim to grow accustomed to waking up so early, an alteration that affects almost every aspect of life. Tailoring their life and diet around their sport, many of the rowers put in up to two additional hours of exercise after practice, bringing their daily total to around five hours, and force themselves to lose as many as 12 pounds in a week to make their boat’s average weight. “Lightweight crew is a sport that demands extreme dedication,” Kuntscher said. “But it also brings extreme rewards, and to be able to row here on the Potomac at a historic school like Georgetown is a blessing. It’s a way of life that requires sacrifices, but brings incredible rewards when the sacrifices are made to their fullest.”
Despite the demands of their extreme lifestyle, the teammates’ mutual dedication forms lasting bonds. “I definitely felt that the guys on my team were my brothers,” Todd Johnson (CAS ‘03) said. “We spent about three hours together everyday. We saw each other when we screwed up and when we were at our best. Freshman year, probably 50 or so guys came down to row. Slow but surely, people started quitting. When I looked around three years later and saw that there were only five guys left—I saw who I could really rely on.” These are the sacrifices and rewards of rowing at Georgetown, a commitment that until recently came without high prestige in the greater rowing community and on campus.
Georgetown has consistently used its crews to help market the school. In commercials, on T-shirts and in leaflets sent to prospective students, Georgetown has used the almost regal sense of prestige that comes with the sport to attract future Hoyas. With the Potomac in spitting distance of the Hilltop, the school has projected an image of a team that warranted a reputation equal to the school’s high academic standards and once powerful basketball team
Until recently, no Georgetown crew could claim to even near the lofty aspirations that the basketball team once reached when it collected its only national title in 1984. While the men’s and women’s lacrosse teams, as well as the men’s and women’s track programs have flirted with a national title, none of these programs have completed the task to date. Over the past three years, the men’s and women’s lightweight crews have ventured close to that goal, and if they can maintain their current trajectory, one of the two programs may very reach a title very soon. The women’s lightweight program has established itself as a title contender, and the men’s team made an incredible run at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships last spring. The new boathouse will enhance the team’s equipment, funding, and profile, and with a young new coach working with dedicated and talented rowers, the men’s lightweight squad seems poised to make a title run.
To date, the team that has come closest to a national title was last year’s men’s lightweight squad, which finished third at the IRA championship regatta on May 31, 2003. The bronze medal was the first IRA award to be collected by any Georgetown crew, and is to date the highlight of the meteoric rise of the program over the past half decade. The sharp increase in competitiveness on the national level was sparked by the arrival of former Head Lightweight Coach Michael Porterfield, a former U.S. national team rower and collegiate national champion and captain at Northeastern University.
Porterfield took over the reigns of the lightweight program in the winter of 2000 and immediately instilled a new work ethic and standard that the program had lacked. The former world championship medallist set lofty goals of medalling at the Eastern Sprints Championships or the IRA Championships for his first crew in the spring of 2001. “I think Mike was without a doubt the best coach in the league, and probably the nation,” Johnson said. “He had a special ability to motivate.”
Porterfield said that rowing was “95 percent effort and five percent talent. The more you put into it, the more you’ll get out,” and developed a refrain for his workout routine that he often repeated to the team: “Bring your lunch buckets to practice, we’re going to work.” Winter training practices often involved 80 minutes of constant rowing on the indoor rowing ergs, testing the athletes’ stamina and health in the unheated training room above Thompson’s Boat House on the Potomac.
After a shocking upset victory over Princeton on the Tigers’ home of Lake Carnegie, the Hoyas gained national hype heading into the championship regattas. While the team came just short of those goals, finishing fourth at both regattas, their ranking marked the closest the team had come to a title and was a marked departure from the traditional eighth to tenth place the team was accustomed to finishing.
While the success of 2001 helped put Georgetown lightweight rowing on the map, the team needed to establish a tradition of competing well in high pressure races and regattas to solidify the respect gained by the 2001 crew for the program as a whole. Using the success of the year before as leverage, Porterfield was able to get improved equipment for the crew, finally putting the team’s competitive resources on a more even keel with their competitors. “Mike brought a certain professionalism to the crew,” Andrew Adler (SFS ‘03) said. “He also built a sense of urgency at every practice. We couldn’t afford to waste any time. That’s why we rowed in the freaking snow over spring break, that’s why every practice had a purpose and was 110 percent focused.”
In 2002 the Lightweight Hoyas fell back in the championship regattas, finishing in eighth and tenth place, but shocked Harvard, perhaps the country’s most storied lightweight program, in a race on the Potomac. With a generally undermanned crew, the team could only field a single eight with two spare rowers, featuring three sophomores with only a year of rowing experience. Porterfield was able to mold a crew that recorded enough upsets to maintain credibility gained the year before. “In 2002, our squad beat Harvard for the first time ever,” Johnson said. “We only had 10 rowers that year but we managed to beat a team with an inexhaustible supply of rowers and a couple national-teamers. We didn’t have another boat to compete against in practice, and Mike worked that much harder to refine our skills.”
The team returned to glory in 2003, as Porterfield built on a solid foundation of returning juniors and seniors and rising sophomore and transfer talent to field two competitive crews in the spring. While having to fight for additional funding for newer improved equipment, much of which he had to initially finance himself, Porterfield continually upgraded the team’s competitive assets, adding another new boat and new oars to help the team compete against its Ivy League rivals. Operating on a budget significantly smaller than his opponents’, and with his $8,000 stipend salary less than a tenth of what many of his rival coaches earn, Porterfield set up one of the country’s hardest racing schedules, including races at Yale, Princeton, and Navy, and against Harvard, Penn, and Delaware-all top-10 programs. “We are forced to practice out of a public facility that we share with hundreds of other college and high school rowers,” Will Sheridan (CAS ‘04) said. “Which would basically be like asking the basketball team to practice on a local playground. It’s really amazing that our program has reached this level of success, as it could just as easily have collapsed entirely.”
“When I was a sophomore we had a team meeting right after winter break, just when Porti joined us,” 2003 Captain Brian McLaughlin (CAS ‘03) said. “He basically asked us what crews like the HYP’s [Harvard, Yale, and Princeton] had that we didn’t-what would hold us back from winning. We went over equipment, etc., but the only thing that we could come up with that they had and we didn’t was a winning tradition. That was the one thing that they could always fall back on. That really wasn’t good enough, so we started kicking Ivy ass, and along the way began our own winning tradition.”
The team responded to the tough schedule with a large amount of success, notching another upset victory over Princeton, defeating Navy for the first time and downing Penn, Delaware, Boston College (twice), Holy Cross, and St. Joseph’s. Entering the Eastern Sprints as the fourth seed, the crew defended their position in their heat before being caught in a wind impaired lane in the final, impeding their race and causing them to finish fifth. After a competitive regular season and riding an impressive second place finish in their morning heat, the second varsity also harbored hopes of medalling before being placed in the same lane and finishing with the same result.
While other teams might have quit following the disappointing endings at Eastern Sprints, the Hoyas returned to the water three days later to begin training for the IRA Championships. Over the course of the next two weeks, 14 of the team’s rowers remained on campus after classes had finished to train for the regatta on May 31. When the regatta finally came, the team was so well prepared that it was able to overcome an injury to its stroke man, then sophomore Cameron Booth (CAS ‘05), and still finished in third place, earning the program’s, and school’s, first IRA medal.
Despite the long road towards success, the team’s merits have gone largely unnoticed because of the lower profile of the sport on campus and lack of exposure to races for the general student body. Additionally, the championship regattas take place after the end of the spring semester, making results difficult for students to hear about unless they are specifically sought out.
While the response to the team’s victories on campus has been underwhelming, other elite lightweight programs were even more reluctant to cast any respect to the up and coming crew. Despite defeating Princeton two years earlier, and entering a week after nearly upsetting then top-ranked Yale, the Daily Princetonian published a race preview predicting an easy victory for the Tigers. While Princeton coach Joe Mendez tried to warn his team of the Hoyas’ danger, the bulletin board material and Georgetown’s powerful base speed, the hallmark of a Porterfield crew, overwhelmed the Tigers and sent a new message to the rest of the nation: We’re here to stay. “Last season proved that we have broken into the upper echelon of sprint schools,” Sheridan said. “This is particularly remarkable because Georgetown brings in far fewer recruits than our chief competitors and has far worse facilities. The program relies almost entirely on walk-ons to commit to an intense year round training program and compete in the nation’s top rowing league with no experience prior to college.”
The maintenance of that message has since been passed on to a new leader at the helm, first-year coach Andy Belden. The former Cornell lightweight rower brought a new program and more gradual physical training and conditioning scheme to the team with an aim to improve on the results of the past. “Andy was quite a shock from Mike,” first varsity and former junior-national team coxswain Louisa Seferis, (CAS ‘05) said. “He’s not in your face, but he’s very systematic and methodical in everything he does. What his style has done is given us a great aerobic base, and that’s translated really well to the water. We’re really long in our stroke, and even if we don’t really know how to do it yet, when we get to the sprint we have a whole lot of energy to go and kill it.”
This year’s Hoyas crew has maintained much of the depth that helped it build success in 2001 and 2003, but the rowers know it will be their own personal and team efforts that will determine their season’s legacy, and perhaps that of the direction of the program. “We have a really great bunch of guys,” Seferis said. “The team is really aggressive on the water in practice and races, and we’re a young team, but [2004 captain Andrew] Lechliter is a quiet leader but does a great job of giving guidance to the younger guys.”
After a fall in which the team struggled to a tenth place finish at the five kilometer Head of The Charles in Boston and an 11th place finish in the five kilometer Princeton Chase, the early returns from the spring season are good. On the spring races’ shorter two-kilometer courses, the Hoyas should be able to use their length and increased aerobic base to a greater advantage. In their first action this past Saturday, the Hoyas blazed past Boston College, Holy Cross, and St. Joseph’s to win the Jesuit Invitational in Camden New Jersey by a full boatlength, after entering as underdogs to BC. The team, currently ranked fifth in the nation, now has two weeks to improve on their race plan and speed before a much-anticipated match up against the Princeton Tigers.
Maybe this time Princeton and the rest of the rowing world will be ready for the possibility of a Georgetown victory. If not, one can rest assured that Lechliter, Sheridan, Booth, Kuntscher, Seferis and the rest of the men’s lightweight team will dedicate every essence of their being to beating everyone else until the rest of rowing, and Georgetown, has to take notice. “We don’t talk any smack,” Seferis said. “That’s one of the great things about this team. Unlike some teams we’re just quiet and go out and get it done. With that attitude, there’s no where to go but up.” And after their past success, the only place that is still up is the very top. “We want nothing less than to be able to win Eastern Sprints in both [first and second] varsity boats,” Sheridan said. “The unique thing about lightweight rowing is that everyone’s the same size. We’re never going to go up against a team that’s just much bigger. There are no excuses. Winning in this sport comes down to power, skill and desire. Though we don’t have the winning traditions of Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, there is no doubt that we have the will to win-and our record has shown that.”
