While most of you went home for spring break, the Radcliffe Heavyweight Crew was here practicing twice a day, and sometimes more, on the Charles River in preparation for its spring racing season.

The Crimson (1-2) opened its season two weekends ago against MIT and Northeastern.

In the first varsity race, North-eastern claimed victory with a time of 6:40.2. Radcliffe finished 7.1 seconds behind Northeastern, but held off third place MIT by 11.2 seconds.

The second varsity boat encountered a similar fate as it defeated MIT, while falling to Northeastern by 2.3 seconds. Both the first and second novice crews won their respective races.

After working out the bugs from the first race, the team prepared for its meeting this past Saturday against the defending national champions from Brown.

Radcliffe came out of the gate quickly staying with the favored Brown boat. Both crews settled in after the fast start and were rowing well as they approached the 500 meter mark.

However, as they passed the mark the Bears began to open up a lead on the Crimson.

The Bears found open water, and continued its push to the 2000 meter finish to defeat the Crimson's time of 6:57.1 by 13.2 seconds.

"We stayed with them through the first 500 meters," junior Erin O'Malley said. "Now we need to work on pushing that out, so we can stay with them longer."

The Crimson did improve on its twenty second defeat against the same Brown team last season, but it was unable to earn its first series victory since 1993.

Brown provided a good test for the young Radcliff crew, which features one senior, six juniors, one sophomore and a sophomore coxswain in its first boat.

"We rowed much better against Brown than we did in our first race. In the MIT and Northeastern race, we were a little rough. We cleaned that up against Brown and we executed our game plan." O'Malley said.

Like the first boat, the second varsity crew couldn't stay with Brown, as it lost by almost twenty seconds.

However, the two novice boats continued their winning ways defeating Brown and improving their records to 3-0.

The first novice boat posted an impressive time of 6:46.5 holding off the Bears by 1.3 seconds in the closest race of the day.

"We didn't really row that well against Brown," freshman first novice boat member Anne Browning said. "We were behind after 1000 meters, but we were able to come back in the sprint. We really proved something to ourselves by coming back on that Brown crew, because we knew they would be really powerful."

After seven long months of practice and two tough losses to Northeastern and Brown, Radcliffe is definitely looking forward to the rest of its season.

"We've been rowing well, but we can definitely improve," O'Malley said.

Princeton will provide Radcliffe with this opportunity when the Crimson travels to New Jersey to face the Tigers this Saturday.