Lucy Cavendish College Boat Club President, Chris Launchbury, reports on a very successful Term.
We welcomed what might be our largest membership ever this year, with over 10% of students at Lucy Cavendish rowing with us.
80 students took part in a water taster, 50 novice erg sessions were run, and 44 novice outings took place on the water.
That’s nearly 140 hours of novice rowing! Once again as a club, we have been thrilled to give so many students the opportunity to learn to row with us. Although not the fastest Michaelmas we’ve had, the spirit of our new novices was captured by NW1 winning ‘best costume’ at Emma Sprints, despite no one being quite sure what they were…
The senior women went out on the water 42 times in the eight weeks of Michaelmas Term - that’s over five times per week - with two coached sessions and a coached erg. We’ve been thrilled to welcome the Lucy staples Abbey Child and Hannah Spry back to coach us on the water, alongside current Lucy student and blues trialist Gloria Jansen who has organised some devious erg sessions!
Michaelmas has also seen Lucy’s second year of accepting male students, and last term our men’s crew had been training jointly with the Hughes Hall men to ensure enough numbers for regular outings.
Lent Term is now upon us, and we have been thrilled to welcome so many novices back amongst our ranks as senior rowers. The women’s squad started the term with a four-day training camp. Packed with gruelling circuits, tough ergs, technical water sessions, and video-analysed rowing tank sessions; the training camp was a huge success and has helped the squad hit the ground running.
Our men’s squad is looking to build on its Michaelmas Term progress and we are excited to welcome another Lucy veteran Cat Darsley and Hughes Hall stalwart Jonah Zankl to the men’s coaching team.
The boat club is now putting 4 women’s crews and 3 men’s crews out on the water, which is an ambitious and exciting effort to get as many students at Lucy the chance to progress with their rowing! Already in the first week of Lent Term, our W1 crew raced in ‘Winter Head-to-Head’, putting a strong performance in this 2x2km race.
Looking ahead, we are excited to see how our boats perform at Newnham Head on Saturday the 4th of February.
Our First boats are also eager to take on the challenge of Lent Bumps. Whilst we await delivery of the M1’s trophy blades from last year’s Mays, the blades of our hugely successful and international W1 returned from the calligrapher and look as stunning as we had hoped!
At the start of Michaelmas term, the club made the decision to service our rowing machines in the college gym and revamp them with new PM5 monitors. We’ve even sold (and hand-delivered) the old monitors to a coastal rowing club in Slovenia!
This was one of the largest spends by the boat club in a few years, and we would like to offer anyone and everyone the chance to ‘sponsor’ a part of each erg. For example, for £16 (that’s just six cups of coffee!) you could name and engrave one of our erg handles - or for £66 you could name a seat!
We are also launching a new funding and sponsorship effort this year, and a leaflet designed together with the Development Office can be downloaded here.
We’re hoping to run more events to include alumni in the activities of the boat club this year, and are excited to send out invitations soon to our Lent Bumps Boat Club Dinner.
Thank you for taking the time to read this newsletter and to catch up on everything LCCBC - and I wish you a Happy New Year from everyone here at the club!