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Sporting Season Review
Rowing Annual Review 2011/12
Franz Imfeld Durham University Boat Club President
The 2011/12 season has been a quite different year to those past, with the completion of the new facilities at Maiden Castle. These ended up being put to good use throughout the winter season with, all bar one race being cancelled in the first term. However this allowed us to focus on building a good base to our strength and fitness for the rest of the year. The start of the season also saw Tristan Mayglothling joining the coaching team as lead women’s coach. He was following on from his success at women’s Henley, where he coached our Durham girls to a win in 2011. He set the squad up well and managed to recruit the biggest women’s squad at Durham, despite the squad being vastly reduced at the end of last year. The Men embarked on their season with Wade Hall-Craggs as the sole coach. The winter was only punctuated by one race, the BUCS Small Boats Head in which Durham saw much success coming away with two golds, a silver and a bronze. From then on, with several cancellations, our next race wasn’t until after Christmas at Quintin Head where both the women’s and men’s Squad competed. The men’s first eight finished fourth followed up by the seconds in thirteenth and the thirds in seventeenth. The women’s eights finished fourth out of the women’s crews and seventh. BUCS Fours and Eights Head marked the start of the real competitive season where the whole club competed in both fours or quads and eights. This was also the first race of the year for the Freshers’ Squad, who had only started to row at the beginning of the season. Unfortunately once again, this race was blighted by problems with half of the beginners’ races cancelled on the first day. However despite not being able to race their target boats DUBC Freshers still finished the day with two golds in men’s eights and women’s fours. The wet and windy weekend was rounded off with the senior races where the men’s squad won one gold, five silvers and two bronze and two golds, a silver and three bronzes for the Women. This race was our preparation race for the Heads in London and a little more work to overhaul the other university first eights was
seen to be needed. This was helped by a series of match races staged in London against the University of London which saw the men’s squad racing side by side up the Boat Race course as well as several shorter pieces. The Women did some work against Thames Rowing Club seen as being one of the top contenders for the headship this year. With these under our belt the club felt ready to take on the Heads in March. The Women rounded off their training with some work at Molesey Boat Club before racing at the women’s Head of the River where they just pipped Newcastle to the Intermediate One Pennant, but losing out on the University Pennant to Reading. Their overall position was eleventh, an improvement on last year’s result with the 2nds also moving up to thirty-first from sixtieth, a vast improvement! The men’s squad saw a big improvement too on their past performance, recording the second highest placing ever of eighth, winning the University Pennant. This was tempered by losing to Newcastle and UL’s full student crews, as well as a non-student crew from Oxford Brookes. The 2nd eight
posted the highest result for many years with both a 3rd and Fresher eight racing. A week later the whole club travelled out on camp to Gravelines in Northern France in preparation for the start of the regatta season. This was a vital part of our training as the next race for us was BUCS Regatta, one of the biggest events of the year. Our success there was completely dependent on converting our endurance pace to sprint racing and Gravelines was the ideal location to do that. Luckily the weather held out and we had summer early, very conducive to hard training! Returning to Durham we fine-tuned our crews before setting up camp in Nottingham for another tough weekend of racing. BUCS Regatta was the usual windy affair with upsets, excitement and satisfaction. The highlight of the weekend was from James Colley, who after only six months training smashed beginner singles, winning gold. James has shown a lot of potential and will no doubt be a big asset to the squad in the coming years. The women’s intermediate eight picked up one of the only golds of the weekend clinching victory
2011/2012 - A Sporting Review