Continuous training and success are motivating the Alabama rowing team into this weekend’s race against Notre Dame, Indiana and Iowa. This will be the last event of the regular season before the team heads into the Conference USA Championships.

The Crimson Tide previously came in first and third place at the Knecht Cup Regatta. Head coach Larry Davis said his team made many improvements recently that have shown positive results.

“We’ve adjusted the lineups a bit, and we’re working on some of the things we feel we need to make in order to get better boat speed,” Davis said. “Based on what we’ve seen so far, the girls have picked up on some of the things so far, and the new combinations seem to be much faster, which is encouraging. We’re going to need that extra speed this weekend.”

Alabama will compete against No. 12 Notre Dame this weekend. Davis said it will be a challenge to compete against Notre Dame, but his team is ready to prove itself.

“We are a little bit of an underdog, and we have to have that attitude to go out there and prove ourselves,” Davis said. “We’ve raced against top 10-20 schools before, so we’ve seen that speed. We need to compete at that level, and that’s certainly why we compete against these high level teams. This weekend is going to give us another chance to test ourselves against many teams. We’re ready to go out and race.”

Iowa and Indiana are more of a match for Alabama, so Davis said he feels fairly confident that they can win races against the two. The new lineups should also give a boost of speed against these two teams.

The competition, which will be held in Bloomington, Ind., will be a two-day event. This last event will set the stage for the conference championships in three weeks.

“We’ve raced many people in our conference, so this should give us a better idea of how the changes we have made are taking and gauge how we do against the other teams and how we compare,” Davis said. “We think we have made some progress. This will be a good test to see what progress we have made and what things we need to keep working on during the next three weeks before conference championships.”

Besides winning, Davis expects this weekend’s outcome to be fairly adequate when competing against Iowa and Indiana. Notre Dame may be a stretch, but Davis said it will help strengthen the team in the coming weeks.

“Notre Dame is a little bit out of our reach, but if we put our A-race on the water, we will be able to give Indiana and Iowa a run for their money and possibly come away with some wins,” Davis said. “They certainly won’t be easy competition, but we want to push them as hard as we can and give them a challenge.”