First the first time in two years, Marin Rowing girls’ varsity Eight + Boat recently completed a new achievement as the hard-working team of girls defeated Oakland, their top competitor, twice in one week.

In previous years, Oakland has beaten Marin, making Oakland Marin’s top rival. However, this year Marin walked away with two wins after the final strokes of both races, located at the Oakland Estuary near Jack London Square, on March 3 and 10.

According to varsity coxswain Jill Berling, the first race required multiple hours of training and workouts beforehand, including double-day workouts during Ski Week.

“Within that one week we just went from zero to ten with all this progress,” she said, “the people in the boat just started working really well together and we just found a lot of speed in that one week.”.

The first race consisted of two beginning heats. The top two boats in each heat moved on to the Final A Heat. Oakland and Marin Rowing won the separate heats.

“We had come up with a race plan that we’d been practicing since Ski Week and we felt pretty confident in it,” Berling said.

As the race drew to a close, Marin started to up their pace in preparation to pass the five seat lead that Oakland maintained throughout the race.

In last 300 meters, before the 2000 meter finishing mark, Marin sped up and managed to cross the finishing point with half a seat up on Oakland.

“Stroke by stroke, we just started taking inches and taking seats, and all of a sudden the race was over,” Berling said. “We started from five seats back to walking through them and then we ended up half a seat up on them.”
Beating Oakland by only 0.2 seconds in the first race was just the beginning for the varsity eight girls.

“Once we beat them in the first race, we knew that we had a chance and we couldn’t just let that go. We came back the next weekend and beat them again by even more,” said Megan Oechsel, who sits stroke seat in the varsity boat.

On March 10, the Marin, Oakland, St. Ignatius, and Berkeley Rowing teams all competed in the first heat of the Battle of the Bay race, in order to determine the top two teams who would then race against each other. Oakland and Marin came out as the top two, once again.

During this second race, Marin sprinted away just before the halfway mark, on their way to another win.

Oechsel said that compared to past years, the varsity Eight + Boat has stepped up their skills by working all together on new race plans.

“We honestly didn’t think that we would be that fast this year,” she said, “Last year, Oakland was so incredibly fast, and with graduating like 17 seniors from our team, we thought we wouldn’t be able to be the same speed as them.”

According to Oechsel, even with the significant loss from last year, the varsity Eight + are very satisfied with the outcome of the races this year.

“It just goes to show you that every stroke really does count, every stroke counts in a race,” Berling said.