Off of the starting line, Andover Girls Crew’s G1 pulled ahead of Kent by about five seats. G1, however, was not able to maintain its lead, and every Andover boat fell to Kent in this past Saturday’s matchup.
G1 finished about 6 seconds behind Kent and G2 finished 10 seconds behind Kent.
Every season, Kent has proven to be one of Andover’s toughest competitors.
Co-Captain Vienna Kuhn ’16 said, “Kent is always one of the strongest boats in our league and so to see them this early in the season without having raced beforehand was definitely going to be a challenge.”
Heading into the race, Andover looked to embrace this challenge and aimed to overlap with Kent until the island at about the 500 meter mark.
Sofie Brown ’18 said, “Coach [Dale Hurley] told us going into the race that we had to use Kent to make us faster because they are a fast team. Our goal going into it was to hold overlap on them and then during the middle 500 along the island, try and walk it through.”
Without any prior races to prepare it, Andover’s focus was placed on its start. In this aspect of the race, Andover was successful as it was able to beat Kent in the race’s initial portion.
Co-Captain Fiona Yonkman ’16 said, “This week in practice we worked a lot on the start of the race, and it really paid off when we squared off against Kent. They have a really fast start, yet we beat them off the line which was really exciting.”
Kuhn said, “Over the past couple weeks, our focus has been on the beginning of the race, and because that went well, we’re hoping that throughout the season, as we work on other aspects of our performance, we’ll see similar results and will be able to beat Kent in the future.”
Andover will use this first race to be able to build up strength for its future races – and will prepare for when it faces Kent again later in the season.
Brown said, “While we were disappointed in our results against Kent, they showed us how much faster we need to get and how quickly we are going to have to get up to full speed and losing to them will make seeing them again at Neiras more fun!”
“Looking to the rest of the races, I think the team has a really good determined and fun attitude and was very supportive of each other this weekend,” continued Brown.
