he Harvard lightweight rowing team has been dominant all year. Its 1V boat has not lost a race in two years, and the 2V just recently suffered its only defeat of the season.

The Crimson entered the season with high hopes for a three-peat after claiming back-to-back Intercollegiate Rowing Association National Championships in 2024 and 2025. Harvard’s first boat kick-started the year as a consensus favorite in the IRCA Pre-Season Coaches Poll, and has reigned at the top of the standings every week since.

The team returned over half of its IRA Championship-winning boat from last season. However, head coach Billy Boyce was forced to adjust the lineup of the 1V boat to fill the void left by the graduation of Brahm Erdmann and coxswain Anya Cheng.

Just as the Nick Saban football teams at Alabama seemed to have an endless supply of talent, so too has the Crimson seemed to reload year after year to maintain the championship standard in its lightweight boats, even after losing such powerful contributors.

That consistency is what distinguishes the lightweights as The Crimson’s Team of the Year. Complacency is a constant threat when you win as much as this Harvard lightweight team. It’s easy to see the past trophies and become overconfident, or feel that the next victory is already guaranteed, and lose that killer instinct. However, this team has avoided the trap of complacency and has now maintained its competitive edge across multiple seasons.

At The Head of the Charles (HOCR) in October, the 1V finished a whopping 15 seconds ahead of second-place Cornell for its fourth-straight HOCR title, literally and figuratively setting the pace for the spring.

Now, with only the IRAs left on its slate, Crimson will travel from Newell Boathouse, where its numerous trophies from its 2025-2026 campaign are displayed, to California.

The team opened its spring competition against Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania in Ithaca, N.Y. Following a decisive win by the 1V and a narrow, hard-fought victory by the 2V, Harvard kept the Franklin Cup in Cambridge.

Across the following two weeks, the Crimson’s winning script remained largely unchanged. Harvard swept Dartmouth in the 1V, 2V, and Varsity Fours to hold the Biglin Bowl for the fourth consecutive year, before dusting Navy and MIT in all three varsity eights races for the Haines Cup and Paulovich Trophy.

Continuing to cram the trophy case, the Crimson earned three more trophies in a series of varsity eight races against Princeton and Yale in late April, falling only to the Tigers in the 3V.

“The team has worked so hard to get to this point this year and all the previous years, but I don’t think we’re going in with excessive confidence,” Ben Lundie, the team’s captain and a 2025 First Team All-American, said about the approaching national championship regatta. “I don’t think we’re looking at it in a different way than we’ve looked at the sprints, or the IRA last season, or the season before. I think that’s down to respecting the opposition. We don’t want to go in overconfident to the point where we let ourselves down.”

Most recently, the 1V prevailed in Eastern Sprints, defeating Princeton again, this time by a second and a half.

A balance of self-assurance and respect is key towards the end of the season. The rowers need to enter each race understanding the strength of their opponents while also maintaining a confidence that matches the team’s incredible achievements – and hardware – thus far.

Despite the top boat being expectedly upperclassmen, two freshmen athletes have broken into the lineup: Jackson Violich and coxswain Nathalie Gregg.

Despite facing the particularly daunting task of leading a crew composed mostly of athletes older than she is, Gregg beat out the other coxswains for the top boat spot. This season’s results have proven that the rookie is fit for the job.

While the team has had immense success this year, the competition has also grown stronger.

“The thing is that the league has risen with us,” junior and 2025 First Team All-American Preston Darling explained. “If you want to define speed, one of the caveats is that everyone will see what you’ve done and think ‘I can do the same thing,’ so everyone in the league has tried just as hard as us.”

Darling also gave specific insights into how the team has trained this year and focused on translating strong skills into the water.

“Fitness-wise, this is the strongest team I’ve ever been on,” Darling said. “We have the best erg score, we have the best average across all the people that we’ve ever had,” he said, referring to the indoor training machines rowers use.

Harvard has particularly strong coxswains, whom Darling credits with a large portion of the team’s success.

“I think coxswains play a far larger part than anyone is willing to give them credit for,” the junior said. “I think the coxswain’s job is to check all the egos and say, ‘this guy or this guy is doing badly, and he needs to fix it.’ If you have a coxswain who doesn’t understand the stroke or the rhythm that you are going for, it’s very hard because they’re twice as important as the coaches, since the coaches don’t sit in the boat.”

The strong contributions of all the student-athletes on Harvard’s roster have fueled the team’s continued dominance, helping it collect many accolades, including The Crimson’s Team of the Year Award.

“We haven’t yet completed all of our goals,” the captain said. “The award reflects the work that we’ve put in up to this point and not only the work of people on the team currently, but all the alumni who have contributed over the past couple of years to build a team from a not-so competitive group to the team that it has been recently.”

Alumni involvement and support have undoubtedly played a role in the lightweight team’s perpetual achievements. Under Boyce’s tutelage, the rowers have consistently demonstrated the ability to prepare diligently and excel year after year, motivating the younger athletes to do the same. When alumni return to watch races and engage with the team, it reinforces the team’s drive and culture.

“To see those guys come not just [to Harvard], but to every race course and cheer them on and see how invested they are in the program shows how important this was to them, how much they love this team, and how much this meant to them,” Boyce said in April.

The team also appreciates the support from its alumni.

“It means a lot, our alumni have been heavily involved in the past couple of years, recent ones as well as ones that graduated a long time ago,” Lundie said.

“I think it helps give the guys on the team a bit of perspective that we’re not only racing for ourselves and the guys on the squad at the moment but for every Harvard lightweight rower that has come before us,” he added.

Coach Boyce’s tenure at the helm of the lightweight rowing program over the last decade has been truly remarkable. The 2024 Ivy League Lightweight Coach of the Year hopes to maintain momentum as his team races towards the end of the season.

Tomorrow, Harvard will begin competition as part of a 10-boat field in the IRA National Championships at Lake Natoma in Gold River, Calif. From May 29-31, six Ancient Eight schools, alongside MIT, Navy, and Georgetown, will be the only teams standing between the Crimson and its third consecutive national title.

Regardless of how it performs in IRAs, the lightweight rowing team has been a marvel to watch this season and is a deserving winner of The Crimson’s Team of the Year.

—Staff writer Asher M. Meron can be reached at [email protected].

—Staff writer Bennett Trubey can be reached at [email protected].