Unaccustomed Problem

Crew coach Peter Gardner was confident his heavyweight eight would do well last spring, and his oarsmen didn't let him down. The boat was unbeaten in cup races, taking the Bill Cup over Rutgers and Boston University, the Cochrane Cup over Wisconsin and M.I.T., and the Packard Cup over Syracuse and M.I.T. Yale and Harvard nosed out Dartmouth in the EARC Sprints, and Gardner's crew finished fourth in the Intercollegiate Row- ing Association regatta at Syracuse. "This was our best overall season, at least it equals that of 1970," says Gardner, who is now entering his 22nd year as the Dartmouth coach.

The Green heavyweights actually were favored to win the IRA regatta, which Harvard and Yale do not enter. "When you're favored, you have a different'sort of pressure on you," concedes Gardner. "It takes a little adjusting. Our crew is not used to dealing with the pressure, and that may be one of our problems." Another problem was the illness-forced absence of Gardner until an hour before the regatta finale. He dismisses the notion that it might have affected the performance of the Dartmouth boat. "I don't think it made a difference," he says. "All the work had been done. In the finals [Dartmouth trailed winner Brown, Wisconsin, and Syracuse by three-quarters of a length], it was that they just didn't race at their best." Assistant coach Dick Grossman says otherwise: "It had to affect the crew." Dartmouth got some satisfaction the next week by defeating Brown for third place in the Pan American trials in Puerto Rico.

The JV and freshman crews both had good seasons, but the lightweights had troubles. "They didn't win any cups, so it was a down season for them," according to Gardner. The women's crew also had a middling season. They defeated Radcliffe, Mount Holyoke, and Syracuse in one race and M.I.T. and Cornell in another, but finished last in three other competitions. The women will have a new coach this coming season. Judy Geer '75, the first Dartmouth woman to compete in a rowing event in the Olympic Games, resigned her coaching duties to train for the 1980 Olympics. In August she was training with the U.S. team in Yugoslavia for the fours event.