On Saturday of Parents' Weekend, the Northwood Crew raced at home for the first time in several years. The Mohawk Home School Rowing Association, a small team from the Schenectady area, brought 13 athletes to race the Huskies in the girls' quadruple scull (a four-seat boat with eight oars, steered by a rower who controls the rudder with a swiveling shoe), girls' and boys' double sculls (a two-seat boat with four oars, rudderless and steered by the rowers via adjustments in the pressure of their "pull" on the boat's two sides), and a specially handicapped matchup between a Mohawk boys' quad and a Northwood boys' coxed four (a slower boat with four oarsmen, four oars, and a passenger, the coxswain, who steers and calls the race plan).

With permission from the Village of Lake Placid, Northwood had set up two 1120-meter-long buoyed racing lanes on Mirror Lake--an important step for Northwood to take, given the lack of straight lines on Mirror and the need for crews in training to accustom themselves to racing down straight courses. The lanes, besides giving Northwood a much-enhanced training environment, also give us our first-ever legitimate home race course. The distance is 380 meters short of a standard sprint race for junior athletes, but Mohawk, who at home are surrounded by big public high schools whose programs favor racing in eights, were happy to make the trip north for a break from the normal long-course time trial format of fall races.

First off were the boys' doubles, in which Aaron Whiteman '09 and Mac Conolly '08, together in the boat for only the third time, raced two Mohawk crews and finished third after threatening to run down the second-place boat in the third quarter of the course. Next, in the girls' quads, Northwood (Blake Bolden '09 with the steering shoe, Olivia Zweber '10, Darby Jenkins '09, Pam Murphy '08) got out early to a small lead and then withstood steady pressure from Mohawk to hang on for a 2-second win. In the boys' quad-vs.-four race, a good matchup between two fit and aggressive crews, Mohawk finished 11 seconds in front of Northwood (Mac Conolly again, Justin Painter '08, Charlie Kidd '08, Hunter Smith '08, coxswain Hannah Sandwick '10). By prior agreement of the two teams' coaches, a handicap based on recent world-championship times for those two boat classes was then applied to the winners' time. It predicted a 15-second win for the quad, so Northwood were declared the virtual winners by a margin of 4 seconds. For the last race of the day, Blake Bolden jumped into the double with Kathryn Pawlak '09—they had taken their first paddle together in the boat not two hours earlier—and did their best to keep up with a determined Mohawk crew who won by a margin of nearly a minute.

After the racing, a lot of cold athletes trooped up to campus to enjoy the day's special lunch. The visitors went home delighted with the day they'd had, and have invited Northwood to make the matchup an annual event.  For more photos, please click here.