"That streak does not really factor into our mentality. If anything, fixating on the streak hurts us," Fallows said. "This is a focus on irrelevant themes, when our real focus is a day-in-day out concentration on the practical elements of rowing."
"This streak is a nice conversation piece for spectators, but not for the athletes. Our advantage is that we think and we generate coordinated effort, and that is what makes boats move," he added.
Given their perspective on the past, and on the three races that await the varsity crew, the individuals on the boat are certainly prepared for the challenge:
Machlaurin and Lenhart attended the pre-camp for the US National Team this summer, and Elzinga plans to attend this summer. Maclaurin's submitted erg times to the National Team testing center placed him fifteenth on the depth chart this past march. Wehrili, a Swiss citizen, rows for his country's Junior National Team. And Bloom, a Canada native, may try to row for the Canadien Junior National Team.
Weiss and McCormack, as well as Elzinga, were both novices when they came to Harvard, and worked their way into the varsity ranks. Sophomore McCormack made the jump from the second freshman boat last year to the first varsity squad. This is especially significant given that the HVL program carries a third varsity and a second varsity boat, in which there are 16 other accomplished rowers.
Thus far, theses two crews have also experienced great success: the 2V boat is also undefeated, and the 3V team has defeated Penn, Cornell and Rutgers this year. Lenhart cited an important goal for the season: to win the Jope Cup, awarded each year to the league at the Eastern Sprints.
Combined with the national winning experience of Fallows and Lenhart--who have rowed together since attending Walt Whitman High School near Washington D.C.--the crew is poised for more great accomplishments. Yet, discussion is seldom made at the boathouse of individual merits. The focus of the crew is on the group identity of the boat, and not on the accolades of any individual.
"What is remarkable about the sport is that each one of us has personal limits but when we get in the boat, we push each another to transcend and rise above them," Weiss said.
Clearly, this crew has a strong sense of team unity, and at the core of this philosophy lies the coaching of Butt. Any of the rowers will defer to Butt's teaching when asked about their motivations.
"Charlie is a great coach because he knows the fine points of technical rowing and he also conveys how to win," Weiss said. "The boat knows how to win, but our challenge is to say mentally on top of the game and maintain our work ethic each day at practice."
The team places a high premium on mental toughness, on establishing competition at a mental level and on wearing down the resolve of its opponents.
In a lightweight boat race, all of the competitors are of roughly the same size and have trained for relatively the same period of time. As a result the margin of victory is determined more by concentration, and not necessarily by physiological superiority over the opposing crew.
Hence, the familiar boathouse idiom that "ergs don't float," emphasizing that brute power on the rowing machine does not necessarily translate into wins in he water. Butt often preaches the "nine on one" approach to racing. The crew and coxswain must function as one unified force, and view the opponent as nine independent rowers, any one of whom is vulnerable to "cracking" or having lapses in concentration.
As the Crimson looks forward to this weekend's competition and to the remainder of the race season, the continue their methodical approach to the sport--rowing with urgency and with consistent practice intensity. coach Butt reminds them that their strength comes from intellectualizing the race.
"One of Charlie's sayings is that you lose a race when you panic, and panicking is not knowing what to think," Fallows said.
The latest EARC coaches' poll ranks the Crimson second in the nation behind Princeton, but there are no predictions at the boathouse certainly this year's team atmosphere colored by the results of last season, which in this as was the defeat to Princeton at the 1998 Nationals.
"Last year, the crew was coming of a national championship victory in 1997, and this win may have led to a bit of complacency," Fallows said. "This year, coming of a loss at nationals, we are much more humble as a crew. We are always trying to learn from our mistakes and to improve our performance."