Women's open crew edges Yale in varsity eights race

"Any Given Sunday" was not Oliver Stone's best work. Cameron Diaz was borderline ridiculous as an obnoxious young owner, and Al Pacino, despite flashes of brilliance, was overall pathetic as a football coach on the edge.

But the movie had one redeeming moment. With his team down big in the season's final game, and the quiet melody of an acoustic guitar backing him up, Al Pacino did what Al Pacino does best — he made an inspiring speech.

After a typically drawn-out "my life is a failure, everybody hates me and it's all my fault" introduction, Pacino delivered the following lines: "Life, death, winning, losing. Separated by an inch. Everything is about inches. We need to fight for every single inch like it's our last. If we can do that, we are going to win this game. And we'll be better men because of it."

Taking a cue from Pacino, and ignoring the gender bias of the last sentence, women's open weight crew defeated Yale this weekend by four tenths of a second in Derby, Conn., with a time of six minutes, 26.9 seconds.

The Tigers got off to a great start, and halfway through the race it looked like they were on the verge of pulling away. But, tenacious like their bulldog namesake, the Yale rowers slowly began to make up for their rough start, gaining ground until the very last tenth of a second.

At the end, when the spray from the oars cleared, the Tigers had won by a mere two seats.

With the exception of the second varsity boat, which lost to Yale by four seconds, all of the other Tiger openweights defeated their Eli opponents with relative ease.

According to sophomore stroke Sasha Suda, this weekend's competition was very encouraging:

"The cool thing about our boat was that even though we saw Yale charging back we maintained our composure and kept the lead. We are really excited about the win. It means a lot with only two weeks of regular season racing left to be competing this well."

The Tigers will be looking to continue their streak of clutch racing next weekend as they head to Mercer Lake to take on Penn and Dartmouth.

Though the lightweight women did not race this weekend, they still kept busy. Realizing that a few inches here or there can make the difference between victory and defeat, the lightweights decided to make a lineup change for the World Cup race on April 28.

The new lineup is as follows: Rel Lavizzo-Mourey will be the coxswain, with junior Linda Loyd will be in stroke. Junior Allison Burmeister will be behind Loyd in seven seat, followed by senior Anne Moore in six seat, sophomore Laurie Dean in five, sophomore Jackie Rosenblum in four, sophomore Melissa Renny in three, and junior Katie Griswold and senior Natalie Branagan in the bow pair.