George Lund

George Lund was the bowman of Washington’s sophomore crew, a returning championship boat that Al Ulbrickson kept intact even while assigning it to the lowest rung of the team’s tentative rankings. Lund’s place in the boat made him part of a collective Ulbrickson valued but did not yet trust to row as a varsity crew; during the ensuing struggles, his timing became one concrete sign of a wider failure of coordination.

Identity and Place in the Crew

When Ulbrickson posted tentative rosters for the new year, four of the five potential varsity boats mixed rowers from different classes and lineups. The exception was the previous season’s first freshman boat, the sophomores who had won at Poughkeepsie. Lund sat at bow, ahead of Shorty Hunt, Joe Rantz, Chuck Hartman, Delos Schoch, Bob Green, Roger Morris, and Bud Schacht, with George Morry as coxswain.

Keeping the boat intact seemed to confirm the boys’ belief that something special had made them successful together. Yet Ulbrickson placed them fifth, below both the first and second boats. The contradiction left the rowers unsure how to read his judgment: they welcomed the chance to row together again, but their championship made the demotion difficult to understand. Their swagger faded, and the season’s harder demands became unmistakable.

Under Ulbrickson’s Scrutiny

The early promise of the intact crew did not settle into consistent performance. When the sophomores began struggling even against junior-varsity rowers, Ulbrickson called Lund, Hartman, Roger Morris, Hunt, and Rantz into his office. He warned them that they could lose their places in contention if they did not improve, and criticized their effort, sloppiness, spacing, and loss of composure. He had hoped to keep their crew together; now he was telling them that the opportunity depended on their rowing as they had at the championship.

The meeting placed Lund among the rowers Ulbrickson considered to be struggling most, but the criticism was not limited to an individual fault. Ulbrickson stressed that several boys were competing for every seat in the first varsity boat. His blunt warning turned the crew’s continued unity into something conditional: the old lineup might remain together, but only if its members could recover the standard that had once distinguished them.

Technique and the Crew’s Larger Problem

As February gave way to March, Ulbrickson abandoned fixed lineups and repeatedly moved rowers between boats, trying to find a combination that could decisively outpace the others. The original sophomore crew remained one of two leading varsity contenders, alongside a previous junior-varsity boat that included Bobby Moch, Stub McMillin, and Chuck Day. Both recorded strong trial times, but neither gained a clear advantage.

Ulbrickson’s logbook tracked specific technical errors across the squad. Among them, he noted that Rantz and Lund caught the water too late. The observation gave Lund a precise place in the season’s technical diagnosis, but Ulbrickson believed the deepest difficulty was not the sum of such faults. He had praised the squad for its many strong individual rowers, yet the word “individual” pointed toward the problem: too often, the boats contained separate performers rather than crews acting together. In that account, Lund’s late catch was both a correctable matter of timing and part of a larger struggle to make the intact sophomore boat function as one.