The men's lightweight crew team traveled down to Tufts last weekend for its first race of the season after its spring training trip. Hoping to do well against the Jumbos, the Big Green did just that, sweeping every race.
Each of the four boats that raced down in Boston came up with a win.
"We were expected to win," Chris White '96 said. "We are always expected to win that race."
The first freshmen crew took its race in 6:44, while the second freshmen boat came in at 7:21 for the win.
In the varsity division, the first boat came away with a 6:38 win and the second crew took only 10 seconds longer, finishing with a 6:48 time.
"Tufts is a warm-up race for us. They don't have the type of crew team that we do," Captain Chris Schmidt '96 said.
Both the first and second varsity crews raced against the same Tufts boat. The Tufts team had only three boats to Dartmouth's four.
"It's not a hard race, but it's nice to start off the season with a win," White said.
The Dartmouth team has another week before racing again. On April 14th, the team travels to Massachusetts to challenge the University of Massachusetts.
This race will be the first time the team has met the UMass team.
According to both White and Schmidt, the team does not expect UMass to be its toughest competitor this season.
"This is the first year that we've rowed against UMass," Schmidt said. "We're not expecting it to be too close."
"Our first two races aren't really official," White said.
What the team does await is April 20th, when the Big Green head back down to Boston to take on Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Our first hard race will be against Harvard," White said. "They are always a tough team. We use that race to gauge our progress to that point. It's a checkpoint."
