How Brown Won Sprints

“One thing that helped was the focus to go all-in together and not worry about anything else—including the result.”

That’s how coach Paul Cooke began to explain how the sixth-ranked Brown heavyweight varsity, which lost their seven-seat to illness the week before, managed to win the Eastern Sprints, the championship for the Ivy League plus seven other top rowing schools.

During the season, they’d lost to Princeton, lost to Harvard, lost to Yale twice, and then came back to win one of the greatest Eastern Sprints finals ever—a final so close that no one on the water knew who had won when it was over (including the commentator who called it for Princeton and signed off promptly without confirmation or correction).

At the beginning of the spring season, Brown traveled to Florida to face most of the top programs in the country—Harvard, Northeastern, Stanford, Washington, and Yale—at the Sarasota IRA Invitational. On both days, they lost.

“We lost everything in the first 500 meters and we held steady for the rest of the course,” recalled the unflappable and inherently positive Cooke. “We were a length down in the first 500 meters to three crews that were dead level. And we finished a length down, so I was like, ‘All right, for March, we’ve got good endurance. Everyone else is faster off the line.’ But it’s not easy to hang on the stern deck of three crews that are fighting it out at the very top level. So I actually thought we had pretty good stubbornness there and was encouraged.”

Brown’s varsity returned home to Providence for an up-and-down regular season, earning cup wins against Northeastern and Dartmouth before ending the regular season by losing the Content Cup at then national No. 1-ranked and undefeated Princeton. Then they lost one of their top oarsmen to illness, and switched out the stern pair.

At Sprints, the Brown varsity won its heat by four seconds over Yale, but ended up in lane 0 for the final, when a seven-boat field was necessitated by Northeastern’s being given a spot in the grand final after hitting geese on the course during its heat, in which they finished third. (Normally, the top two from three seeded heats advance to the grand final.)

In the grand final, Cooke admired seven-year defending champion Yale’s approach, jumping out to a length lead.

“For Yale to go out the way they did, that showed so much audacity.”

The Elis, who finished third, were chased by Princeton, Harvard, and Penn. But in the last 500, Brown kept coming and took the victory at the line—by a tenth of second. But how?

“The answer is a couple things. One is, you never know,” said Cooke. “How do you do anything? You never really know.

“Jack [DiGiovanni] did a nice job at cox to orchestrate that. But they all did a good job with it.”

Cooke credits also his assistant coaches, Rufus Biggs and Scott Cockle.

“Those two guys have done a really good job” bringing perspectives on training that are “science-based and also program-based. We look at it like you have four years of college to change your physiology—a little bit like you’re doing an Olympic cycle.

“It’s definitely a very experienced group. They did a good job of keeping engaged and enjoying the practices. They wanted to come down every day and get better. They enjoyed competing and each other’s company and didn’t get too upset [by losses], and through the course of the year there was good leadership.

“They really worked hard for it.”.

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