Victory! Tigers are the only cats that enjoy water, and the women's crew teams were reveling in it after spectacular racing last Sunday.
The women's crew teams won the Chick Willing Point Trophy this weekend for capturing the overall championship at Eastern Sprints.
With 71 total points, they beat out Brown and Virginia as their closest competitors with 65 and 64 points, respectively.
The lightweight team was able to take first place in their first varsity eight final, defeating perennial rival Wisconsin by 1.8 seconds.
"We are really excited," senior lightweight Linda Loyd said. "It had been a rough season prior to this race, but we were determined to prove ourselves, and we obviously did that."
The defending national champion lightweight team found themselves in a familiar position battling Wisconsin for an Eastern Sprints title. The Badgers beat out Princeton last year by only .55 seconds. This year the Tigers were able to avenge that loss with their victory over Wisconsin.
"We weren't surprised by the outcome," Loyd said. "We really didn't know what to expect. We knew Wisconsin was really fast, but we were confident that we had gained a lot of speed and a lot of racing maturity in the last three weeks since we raced them."
One would imagine that confidence would not be hard to come by for such a dominating team, but the Tigers made sure to pick it up along the way to Easterns.
"We were a lot more confident as a boat," Loyd said. "We beat Radcliffe last weekend, and that just gave us a lot of confidence coming into Easterns."
The lightweight novice eight won its race in the finals by 12.5 seconds over the nearest competitor, Wisconsin. The lightweight four team fell to the Badgers by 9.3 seconds.
The open women's team did not have such a rosy day on Cooper River in Camden as the two varsity eight teams had disappointing outcomes.
The first varsity eight came in fourth, while the second varsity eight finished in fifth place. On the bright side for the Tigers, the third varsity "A" and "B" boats finished in second and first places, respectively, in their races. The first novice eight won its final, and the second novice eight finished second in its final.
"The two novice teams had excellent races," senior Chrissy Lavdovsky said. "Our two varsity boats did not have good races at all. We think we are going to do a lot better at Nationals. Overall we are happy because we won the points trophy, but the two varsity races didn't go as well as we expected."
Senior captain Cathy Marsella summed it up as "disappointing. They were great races, but we think we could have done better. It's really tough for the first varsity to see Yale and Harvard [Radcliffe] finish ahead of them since they have beaten them consistently over the last few years. They were bummed."
With a team victory, however, Princeton has a lot to celebrate going into Nationals, which will be held May 31 through June 2 in Indianapolis for the open team and May 30 through June 1 in Cherry Hill for the lightweight women. Cherry Hill was also the site of the Eastern Sprints for the women's teams.
"It is going to be a toss up," Marsella said. "Sprints is our big race for the year. A lot of other teams try to peak for Nationals, but we try for Sprints. Academics will be done with so a lot of stresses that we had that other teams didn't will be gone. If we get medals there, we'll be really happy."
With both the women's teams ready to pounce on a victory at the national championships, we could once again see smiling Tigers in the water.
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