<p>My examples of recruited times all come from lw women in the last year who were recruited to lw teams at Stanford, Harvard and Princeton. They encompassed the range from a 7:30 2K on up to a couple of 7:50 times. For the most part it was low 7:30’s to low 7:40’s. Stalkermama, other lightweight programs exist at Wisconsin (very competitive team), MIT and Georgetown (though I don’t know if they’ll continue to have a dedicated lw program from now on, with the change in coaching?). Other colleges that launch lightweight boats, but don’t have dedicated lw teams, are Tufts and Bucknell (though I’ve heard that Bucknell doesn’t recruit lw’s per se, but simply races the lighter ow’s who slim down to make weight in the Spring. Could be wrong, just the scuttlebut). I’m sure CC’ers can weigh in (no pun intended) with some other college names, but the fact is, there aren’t too many. Oh! BU is starting a women’s lw team. That’s another. Maybe the trend of dropping women’s lw teams (they were pretty much added in the Title IX era and have been disappearing since), will begin to reverse. That would be something!</p>
<p>The good news is that lightweights, especially those tall ones, as Beenthere2 remarks, can be very attractive to openweight teams… and then that gives the potential recruit a LOT more options. D went on her college tour last summer and got a lot of meets with coaches at openweight DI and DIII teams. In the end, because she’s a shorter lw, only a couple of NESCAC (D3) teams remained interested, but that was ok. She would have been happy to row for them. She’s happier though to be headed to a lw team where she can compete on a more level playing field (or whatever the equivalent crew metaphor would be).</p>