Aside from the typical sports associated with the weather transitioning to spring: baseball, softball, track and field, women's rowing is also resuming its activities and getting competitive.

While the team works year round and has competitions in the fall, the spring season is where things are important. It includes the Atlantic 10 Championships and nationals, for any team strong enough to get there.

"It's incredible the work up that it gets through the year," senior Liz Whitman said. "We start in the beginning of fall season talking about how exciting spring is and how important it is to keep up the three or four months of hard work to go into the last two months of competitive racing."

Dayton's rowing program, a little-known, non-scholarship group of athletes, has been working tirelessly to prepare for this season. The Flyers had three competitions in the fall and since the weather has gotten cold they've continued working out indoors - rowing, lifting weights and yoga.

"We love it [doing yoga]," Whitman said. "We do a lot of work with some of the other teams, the track team particularly. One of the track girls comes in and works with us on yoga, and we're getting a lot stronger and a lot more flexible which is benefiting our technique."

Now the time has come to get back out on the water. Whitman said the Flyers are planning on being back on the river in just a couple weeks, so long as the temperature raises just a bit.

Things will then kick off the weekend following spring break, when Dayton has a competition against Duquesne and West Virginia March 13. The season will culminate more than a month later at the A-10 Championships April 17. The Flyers will only be seeing a few of their A-10 opponents at meets before the championships. Whitman said the ladies have come up with a method of preparing themselves for their opponents anyway.

"We have taken one week for the wintertime when we're indoor training and devoted it to a certain team in the A-10," she said. "Our team will research [the team], what they did this fall, what their roster looks like, if they have any returning team members, and then we work all week thinking of [that team]."

While not a powerhouse in the conference, the rowing team has steadily improved over recent years and is now among the best in the league.

"I think in the last few years we have gotten stronger and faster," head coach Derek Copeland said. "Now I think we are definitely in that top group of teams in the A-10."

Whitman thinks the team has come a long way as well.

"We've grown exponentially in our strength and our speed throughout my four years," she said. "We just have that drive that gets us up there with the rest of the scholarship teams."

The Flyers will also benefit at the A-10 Championships from a new scoring system. Before, it was important to be able to field a team to race at every varsity and junior varsity distance (a total of eight races), so having enough girls was the key to winning. In the new scoring a team can compete for the title with 20 rowers and three coxswains.

Whitman is hopeful the team will be a major threat come A-10s.

"[We want] to definitely stay within that top ranking for A-10s," she said. "To work our way in and make people step up and recognize that we have a fast team and that they should start looking for UD. I think we are going to make a big name for ourselves this year."