Issue date: 2/9/10 Section: Sports

Media Credit: Sports Information Rowing eagerly anticipating the start of the new season.

The NSU women's rowing team will be looking to try and improve upon what has been a remarkable couple of years in the history of the program. On the strength of three consecutive Sunshine State Conference championships in the varsity 4 and the varsity 8 and a NCAA national championship in the varsity 4, the rowing program have built solid foundations that they are looking to build upon.

Head coach John Gartin believes "the speed of division II rowing has gotten better every year, a couple of years ago their seemed to be a lag in the SSC in terms of the speed compared to the rest of the nation."

However, Gartin believes the SSC will be a lot tougher this season "this year I have to had it to them, FIT and Barry are back, solidly, and for us we really need the freshman to step up as we graduated nine seniors, five of which were at nationals with us, so we need some women to really step up."

Improvement is evident within the rowing program already "I have seen it, I have seen everyone coming along but the other part of it is I know the other crews are fast so this is not going to be a cake walk, its going to be nip and tuck," added Gartin.

Without wishing to look too far into the future the rowing program believes their immediate goals and objectives remain in-house "we have internal goals were we want to get faster just simply being fast on the rowing machines and faster in the boat itself, kind of racing ourselves a little bit," said Gartin.

The Sharks have also set themselves intermediate and long term goals "we also have intermediate goals like the Barry dual race, its going to be here, its going to be our only home race so that's definitely one we want to get in the basket again Barry's back and Barry is real so again we are not going to walk away from anybody," stated Gartin.

Looking long term "It's not going to be easy but one of our long term goals is going to be to repeat for sunshine state but we cant even focus on the idea of repeating we simply have to go and do it again, we have to go and do it," emphasized Gartin.

"Once we get that out of the way we can look ahead to see were we are at comparatively for nationals, if we don't win the conference we are very far behind in terms of getting selected so without a conference win all bets are off," added Gartin.

Continued...

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