Brown Cup

Music Hi, my name is Mike Pierce. I'm the head men's coach at UBC. I've been coaching here for 30 years. The round cap is really meaningful because it really sort of showcases the best of Canadian University rowing. The Erg scores are a critical piece to that, but so is boat moving ability, but they've got to get themselves into the ballpark with those Erg scores for sure. It was definitely pretty challenging coming back from a co-op. So I came back and I started right from the bottom of the barrel. I had to work my way up. It was 6Ks, 2Ks, a lot of sea racing matrices and a bunch of spot racing as well. A lot of training happened on the Erg on the bike and on the water here and that definitely gave me a big level of confidence going into those selection events. Music It's really motivating for guys to see that they're improving their fitness. So the Erg test is always a strong measure of how effective their training is going. There's a toughness element to Erg test too that is a critical part of our sport. Music The mentality for the 2K is definitely the toughest for me because on the water there's always little technical tweaks and stuff that you can make to get yourself a little bit faster. At the end of the day a 2K is really just about how much pain you're willing to endure and I think that can be difficult sometimes. Music Hello, my name is Joel Cullen. I'm one of the captains and this is my 50 year on the team. People tend to get in their heads a lot around sea racing. You put in the work and today's just where you show it. I think if you go in with the right attitude and if you have the right culture on the team then the sea racing can only beneficial and it'll boost everyone together. I think we've worked really hard to develop that. It's pretty clear though that if you have cracks forming within the team, sea racing is where those can get exposed. We want to make sure that we give all the athletes a really good sense that they've got an opportunity to try to make that brown cup crew. So that's where the sea racing comes in. Sea racing, especially the way we do it at UBC is quite intense. There's a lot of sea racing. We do it on water that can have a lot of factors that may not always give clear results, which I think pushes that level of uncertainty and ultimately level of competition even more. Here we go. Four minutes. One, two, three, two, one, down, step up, go, right go on. I'm sea racing with a really good friend. He's my roommate. Kind of going through this stressful experience together. Even though we're trying to beat each other, we're both kind of going through the same stress and same process. And I think neither of us wants anything bad for each other. We just also want the best for ourselves. I think one of the most important parts with sea racing is that both of us know that when we go out there and we race each other, we're going to do our absolute best to beat each other, but we're also going to race with integrity and honesty. Right neither of us are going to kind of try and get any dirty tricks in. We're just going to try and beat each other through sheer rowing capability and strength and fitness. So it's been kind of cool, you know, like still hanging out together and just, you know, giving each other a fist b It kind of brings us closer together through that shared experience. We're going to go in two. There's one. Two. Ready? You