Just a week after the Head of the Charles Regatta, the Georgetown men’s and women’s rowing teams traveled to Princeton, N.J., to compete in the annual Princeton Chase Regatta.

The race marked the official collegiate debut for Georgetown freshmen on both squads. For the women’s team, Georgetown had a combined openweight and lightweight freshmen boat.

That group finished fifth in a 12-team field. The other women’s boats also competed well, with the varsity eight-person boat placing 16th overall. That result marks a significant improvement from last year, when the team placed 25th overall. Georgetown’s varsity four-person women’s boat finished 21st in a competitive race that included boats from Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth and Boston University.

“I think [the freshmen] did really well. Our top boat finished fifth out of 12 programs. It was their first race as collegiate freshmen and we think it’s a fun thing to do in the fall, to mix them together, so they’re not separated out,” Head Women’s Coach Miranda Paris said. “They got out of the water and they knew they’d really performed their best, and that’s hard to do when you’re racing time trials format. I was happy with it overall.”

The men’s freshmen boat also competed well, especially considering the fact that this was Georgetown’s walk-on rowers’ debut. In the men’s varsity heavyweight eight-person race, Georgetown placed 15th in a field of over 60 boats. In the men’s varsity lightweight eight-person regatta, Georgetown finished 20th in a field of over 30 boats. The men’s heavyweight four-person boat placed 27th in a competitive pool, while the lightweight four-person team finished 14th.

“They beat a few boats full of recruited kids so that’s a really good sign,” Head Men’s Rowing Coach Luke Agnini said.

Returners raced in a variety of heavyweight and lightweight races on the 3-mile course. The field was stocked with tough competitors ranging from top programs like Yale and Boston University.

“They did not have a good race, but the result was still pretty decent,” Agnini said. “I think it’s all good learning points for the spring for these guys. It was a chance for them to realize that ‘Hey, even though we had a bad week at practice and a tough race, we can still put out a solid performance.’”

Heading into the race, Agnini emphasized the important of mid-race awareness on the boat. While physical fitness improves over an extended period of time, Agnini noted that awareness can progress on a day-to-day basis. Following the Head of the Charles, the men’s team’s focused on awareness in practice.

“That was the focus at the end of the week working up toward the regatta … was getting rid of all the distractions and being aware of what the guys had to do,” Agnini said.

The women’s team had headed to Princeton with the hopes of maintaining the second-half aggression exhibited in the Head of the Charles. That regatta saw Georgetown compete against some of the top rowing programs in the country and finish 24th out of 34 teams in the eight-person race and ninth of 13 in the four-person race.

“Our goal was to add aggression to that first half — we didn’t really go out hard enough in the Head of the Charles, and I really thought we did do that in this race. We really narrowed the margin and gaps between us and other programs we saw at the Head of the Charles,” Paris said.

Characteristic of the Princeton Chase was the high level of competition present. Most of the Ivy League schools’ rowing teams were present, as well as top national programs including Virginia and California.

“It’s very cool to compete with the very top in our sport, and I don’t think there’s many sports on campus that regularly get to compete with national champions or top-five or 10 caliber programs,” Paris said.

The Princeton Chase marks one of the last races of the fall for the Georgetown teams, leaving them ample time to focus on training. The women will compete in the Head of the Occaquan Regatta in Lorton, Va., on Nov. 1 and then enter the winter offseason. The men’s final race of the semester will be on Nov. 7 at the Rutgers Classic in New Brunswick, N.J.

“Now we can just focus on doing some stuff indoors on the rowing machines, and that’s where the guys will really find out how to get to the next one or two gears,” Agnini said.