Katie Modolo SUathletics.com Diary
4/10/2001 12:44:29 PM | Women's Rowing
Katie Modolo, senior captain of the Orangewomen rowing team, writes about the team's recent trip to Ithaca, where the rowers had an interesting start to their practice and some leisure time to shop.
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This past weekend, our team traveled to Ithaca, NY and raced against Yale and Cornell. With Ithaca being only about an hour and a half bus ride away, it is by far our shortest journey to competition in the spring. The sleep in before we left on Friday morning was a welcome one. Once in Ithaca, we did our usual rigging routine and got out on the canal to practice, only practice wasn’t so usual. When we spun it around at the start, a few of us noticed that there was a cop walking around in the brush by a small forest…and his gun was pulled. He shouted to us and asked if we’d seen anybody wearing a red jacket. All I could think of was that we were at Cornell (nickname; the Big Red), the chances of that would be pretty good, but none of us had. We started our practice and left the policemen to do his job.
Practice ended and we got a chance to grab dinner at the Commons near Cornell University. Some people went to a vegetarian place, others went to Thai, Meredith (the only other senior) and I went to the Benchwarmer, a sports bar/restaurant. We were able to go shopping for a little while and found some pretty good deals, the best one being Meredith’s new purple hat. Nobody really knew what it was supposed to be used for, but for 75 cents, who could go wrong? One thing is for sure, she’s a head turner with it on.
After dinner, back at the hotel, we had our boat meetings to go over the race day schedule so that we were all on the same page. We got our strategy together as well as a new member on the Varsity boat. Libby Graves was moved up into the Varsity boat from the JV after Nicole Garofalo injured her knee. All of the boats were affected by this move, but we’ve learned to adjust in the past and this time would be no exception.
Race day came and so did the fog. The sun wasn't going to burn off the fog too fast either. Eventually our team hit the water boat by boat. All of us were glad to get to the starting line after lengthy delays.
After a good weekend of racing, it’s always fun to get back on the water on Monday, especially on to the calm, flat water of Onondaga Lake. The ice is gone and practice possibilities are endless.
On Tuesday, a television crew and another newspaper reporter were at the boathouse to do some interviews. This is something our team definitely isn’t used to. As most rowers are aware, our sport doesn’t usually get a whole lot of coverage, if any at all. But something happens when a team starts to climb the ranks, and it’s nice to see the Syracuse community taking notice.
