FAIRFAX, Va. – George Mason University's women's rowing team will follow the busy fall it had with seven races in the spring season, three of them on its home course at the Occoquan Reservoir.

The team will get the spring started with two week-long training camps. The first one will be held in mid-January, when head coach Ted Nagorsen and assistants Joseph Richards and Katie O'Driscoll will take the team to Tampa, Fla. Once northern Virginia temperatures become more pleasant in mid-March, a second training camp will take place, this one much closer to home, at Sandy Run National Park.

On March 25 the Patriots will face competition for the first time in the spring as they travel to Norfolk, Va. for the Old Dominion Scrimmage against the Monarchs.
Starting on April 2, when it hosts the Occoquan Sprints, Mason will participate in three races in the span of 12 days, a busy stretch that will end on the same course with the George Cup on April 14, where pride will be on the line as the Patriots clash with local rivals Georgetown and George Washington. In the weekend between those two events, the team will travel to Mercer, N.J. for the Knecht Cup, a race that will provide a wide array of competition for the young Mason team.

The highlight of the regular season will come with the team's final home race of the spring, the Mason Invite. On April 23, in a format unheard of before in NCAA
rowing, Mason and Atlantic 10 Conference rivals Dayton and George Washington will square off with Big 12 (Kansas, Old Dominion, West Virginia) and Colonial Athletic Association (Eastern Michigan, Delaware, Buffalo) opponents. The event will begin with three inter-conference races and will follow with three more races later that day in which each team will race the two teams with an identical place finish in the other inter-conference races. The grand finale of the Mason Invite will have the best teams of each conference race each other in the Occoquan Reservoir with the winner taking the bragging rights not only for itself but for its conference as well.

The Patriots will then switch their focus entirely to A-10 competition with the Atlantic 10 Championship scheduled for May 6 in Pennsauken, N.J. Less than a week after the conference championship, Mason will make another trip north, this time to Philadelphia, to finish off the spring season with the three-day Dad Vail Regatta, which is scheduled to start on May 11.