"B.U., Brown and Wisconsin are going to be strong teams this season," first-year Radcliffe Coach Liz O'Leary said.

Princeton is also supposed to be one of the better crews this season, but Radcliffe has already cruised by the Tigers, beating them by a large seven-second margin last Saturday.

The heavyweights will have a chance to face Wisconsin this weekend when they travel to Redwood Shores to compete in an invitational regatta sponsored by Stanford.

"Wisconsin and Washington are going to be our hardest competition," Captain Debbie Porterfield said. "It will be easier to predict the outcome of our season after this weekend. It looks promising."

Lights

In the 13 year history of the Radcliffe lightweight crew team, the Black and White have lost but a single regular season regatta--that to the University of New Hampshire in 1983.

The lights are the defending national champions, and two weeks ago recaptured the gold medal in the San Diego Crew Classic after a one-year absence from the event.

In San Diego they faced their "toughest" competition--University of California at Santa Barbara and University of California at Davis--and handily defeated them by 13-and 14-second margins respectively.

Radcliffe is so strong, in fact, that its main problem is finding competition. the wining part just seems to follow naturally.

Lightweight Coach Holly Metcalfe is trying to get crews from the Dadville League to compete in the Eastern Sprints.

"Hopefully now there will be more eights and fours competing," Metcalfe said. "Hopefully it will thicken up the competition for everybody."

"The lightweights have always been competitive," varsity lightweight Captain Allison Pugh said. "Training with the heavyweights [doing the same workouts] has a strong effect. We have a lot of high hopes."