©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

No sound, lots of fury for Mount’s golden V-8
by TOM UTESCHER

Members of the Mount's varsity eight pose with their gold medals and the Robert Engman Trophy. Front row (left to right): mary Grace Maggiano, Francesca Crozier-fitxgerald, Meredith Walsh and head coach Megan Kennedy. Back row (left to right): Megan McCusker, Steph Farris, Emily Walker, Meg Kehan, Hilary O'Shea, Jane Mieczkowski and varsity coach Mike McKenna.

It began right on the starting line in Saturday’s championship race at the Stotesbury Cup Regatta. In Mount St. Joseph Academy’s varsity eight, the cox-box – a sort of compact public address system used by coxswains to communicate along the length of these long vessels – began to malfunction.

During the race that followed, the final event at the largest high school regatta in the world, the rowers heard junior cox Jane Mieczkowski’s voice only intermittently, as if listening to a mobile phone call in a bad cell. Fortunately for this seasoned crew, everything else was in sync, and a furious final sprint allowed the Magic to overtake a boat from Winter Park, FL and capture the Stotesbury gold medal for the second year in a row.

Another 11th-grader, Megan McCusker, rows the stroke seat and is one of five veterans from the 2005 V-8.

Asked to compare the two winning efforts, she responded “I was more nervous this time, because last year we already had a six-seat lead by the middle 500 [in the 1500-meter race]. “I was really scared, actually, but then it was so awesome at the end when we pulled through.”

The other returnees from the ’05 crew are seniors Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald (six seat), Meredith Walsh (five) and Mary Grace Maggiano (four), and junior Emily Walker (two). The “rookies” in the boat had also earned gold medals in 2005; Mieczkowski and classmate Steph Farris (seven seat) in the lightweight eight, and Meg Kehan (three) and Hilary O’Shea (bow) in the freshman eight.

As stroke, McCusker is positioned just a few feet from the cox, so the glitch in the sound system wasn’t an issue for her. It was a different matter for O’Shea, a sophomore free-spirit who’s situated at the opposite end of the boat, both literally and figuratively, from the intense Mieczkowski.

“I could only hear her faintly,” she said, “but I was thinking, if we lose, Jane’s going to blame it on herself, so we have to pull a hundred times harder to keep that from happening.”

The cox-box failure caught Mieczkowski off-guard.

“It was always fine,” she said. “We think maybe it got wet. It sounded a little weird when we went out for practice, and then in the final it didn’t work right the whole time.”

On Friday, the Mount crew battled a headwind, but still looked strong as they led off the qualifying round, where the boats that recorded the top 18 times advanced to the semifinals. When all the results came in, however, Winter Park had trounced the field with a time of 5:30.52, and the Mount was back in sixth, at 5:45.15. Even the second-place Mainland (NJ), was 12 seconds behind the Floridians.

An unperturbed Mike McKenna, the Mount varsity coach, explained, “The wind stopped, so the times were bound to pick up. I was hoping no one really fast would be coming down after that, but when I saw Winter Park, I knew they’d won the qualifying.”

Not all the members of the Magic’s V-8 had time to contemplate this development; Crozier-Fitzgerald, Maggiano and Walsh were due at the Mount’s senior prom in just a few hours’ time. Dashing to assistant coach Sheila Dyer’s nearby apartment, they transformed their look from athletic to elegant, then returned to boathouse row, where they were collected by their dates.

“Mr. McKenna arranged for us to go over to Sheila’s and get our hair done, and we love him for it because it meant so much to us,” Walsh said.

Their understanding escorts didn’t mind that the girls had to leave around ten’o’clock; as Walsh noted “They’re all good guys, and they got how important this race was to us.”

Maggiano was happy to make an early night of it; she’d started to come down with a cold on Thursday night at the team’s pre-race pasta party, and was throwing back shots of DayQuil® over the weekend just to maintain a semblance of normal respiration.

Slotted in the first of three semifinals late Saturday morning, the Mount went up against Winter Park, the crew which blazed through the qualifier. It turned out that both coaches had decided to go for broke in the semifinal, because the winner would race in the coveted third lane for the final, not too close to the riverbank, nor to the middle of the river and the backwash created by the head of Peter’s Island.

“It would’ve been easy to back down, but I was pretty comfortable with our fitness level, so we went after it,” observed McKenna, who preferred not to tempt fate twice after the 2005 Mount V-8 had captured the gold medal from the supposedly-jinxed lane six, next to the island.

The Magic won this tight semifinal duel in a time of 5:28.80; so Winter Park, second in 5:30.44, would line up in the sixth lane. The second semifinal saw St. Andrew’s win in 5:23.97, and the third heat was the closest and fastest of all, with Bishop Eustace prevailing in 5:17.21, just six-tenths of a second ahead of Lawrenceville. The weather, particularly the wind, was so changeable that by this point, no one was putting much stock in time disparities between the heats.

The final was shaping up to be a battle royal, and as it got underway a little after five’o’clock, it quickly became apparent that no one boat was going to walk away from this field. After several lead changes, the Mount was ahead by a modest margin as the boats entered the final 500 meters and began to come alongside Peter’s Island.

All along the course, the Magic coped with the interruptions in Mieczkowski’s call of the race. She noticed the malfunction a third of the way down, and said that after that, “I just screamed as loud as I could, and I figured whatever they heard was going to have to work. I tried to keep it simple; I didn’t use sentences, just one-word things they would understand.”

Varsity veteran Crozier-Fitzgerald said that the chronic audio problems the 2005 V-8 experienced had taught her to compensate.

“Jane kept coming in and out, but I could sort of pick up what her ideas were,” she recounted. “For instance, when I heard McKenna’s name, I knew that was our power-ten [a sequence of particularly strong strokes], because we usually dedicate one to him.”

During the race, the wind picked up, blowing generally upriver, and slightly from the west, causing McKenna to worry about the effect on his somewhat undersized Mounties. Alongside the island, Winter Park momentarily enjoyed an advantage in lane six, sheltered from the wind more than the crews in the middle of the stream. The Wildcats moved to the fore and led by as much as half-a-length, but then they cleared the bottom of the island and were buffeted by the stiff breeze once more (think of passing a tractor trailer on the highway, and getting jostled by its “bow wave” as you pull ahead).

Unlike Crozier-Fitzgerald, Kehan, up in the three seat, couldn’t effectively interpret the staccato squawks coming from the faulty cox box, so she just relied on her instincts.

“I could only hear every other word, but I could just feel that we were bringing it up and sprinting,” she related. “Those last three hundred meters, we just pounded it.”

In the grandstand, the rhythmic chant of “Win-ter Park, Win-ter Park” subtly diminished in volume, and Mount fans cranked it up. Their Magic V-8 crossed the line in 5:44.89, beating the Florida boat by 2.38 seconds while Lawrenceville took third in 5:49.71. Finishing fourth through sixth were St. Andrew’s (5:51.77), Bishop Eustace (5:53.41), and another New Jersey team, Mainland (6:00.05).

After the colorful row of team tents – more than a mile long – had largely disappeared from the Schuylkill riverbank, and hordes of cars and vans had been cleared off of adjacent Kelly Drive, the Magic varsity loaded their eight back into the last open berth on the Mount trailer. They posed for a few more photographs while gobbling their beloved Junior Mints, and they gathered around to pet Snowball, the white hare that belongs to one of the girls.

Walsh scooped up her belongings and surveyed the Schuylkill one last time, wearing her gold medal and clutching the wrist corsage from her prom. They say you can’t have everything, but many times, you can get what you deserve.