Huskies celebrate crew championships

Washington celebrated not only a national rowing championship but also a stirring, come-from-behind victory that still had coaches and athletes buzzing three days after pulling it off.

UW athletic director Scott Woodward and a dining room full of fans honored Washington rowers at Conibear Shellhouse Tuesday night. The Huskies swept all eight-man events — varsity, junior varsity and freshmen — and also took gold in the open fours last Saturday at the 107th Intercollegiate Rowing Association championship regatta on Lake Natoma near Sacramento.

No school had swept all the eights since UW did it in 1997.

The men's varsity eight capped off the day with a scintillating win, rallying from a nine-seat gap over the second half of the 2,000-meter race to edge its arch rival, top-ranked California, by one second at the finish.

How substantial was that nine-seat deficit? "It's like trailing a football game by three touchdowns," fifth-year men's coach Michael Callahan told the Conibear crowd, eliciting laughter. "It was time to put some points on the board."

The Huskies did, using a spirited push at the 750-meter mark to shift UW's boat, in third at the time, into overdrive.

"We knew we had to drop the hammer," said senior Jesse Johnson, a Mercer Island graduate who occupied UW's No. 6 seat, "and just ignore the pain."

Fans watched a video replay of the race. The Huskies first surged past Stanford and then progressively crept closer to Cal. Coxswain Katelin Snyder spotted concerned expressions in Cal's boat as UW made up ground.

"They knew we were about to beat them," she told the crowd, evoking a loud cheer.

Sophomore Hans Struzyna, a Bellevue Christian grad who rows in the No. 2 seat, also felt momentum shift in UWs favor.

"We put on our press," he recalled, "and I saw their stern tip slowly coming back toward us. I could tell we started to move into them, and we started eating them up seat by stroke. By the time we crossed the 400-meter mark, I absolutely knew we were going to get them. That was the most amazing thing I've felt in my life."

Washington won the men's V8 IRA title in 2007 and finished second last year after going undefeated before that event. UW had four losses this season.

"I didn't think we'd drop as many races as we did early," Callahan said. "I thought we'd take it up another level, and by the end we did. But it wasn't always smooth.

"Sometimes teams and boats click right away," he said. "This is a team that had to work for it. That's what makes this win so satisfying — it wasn't all so easy. We had to put a lot of things together for it to happen. It required everything we had, and that's what we gave at the end."