Progressively, rowing coach Zach Johnson believes his UC San Diego crew is about ready to venture into the collegiate Pac 12\u00a0stronghold that includes California State Berkeley and University of Washington, winners of eight of the last 10 national championships. “Honestly, we\u2019re not quite at that level,” said the Tritons coach, who is now entering his sixth year at UCSD. “But last year, we were ranked nationally in the top 18.\u00a0That\u2019s something you don\u2019t do overnight.” Johnson said he believes that year by year there are signs of getting a little closer to join\u00a0UCLA, USC, Oregon, Stanford and Oregon State. “Cal [Berkeley] and Washington are the cream of the crop and get a lot of kids from overseas,” said Johnson. \u00a0 He said he has prepared his team well enough to compete in the last two Copley Cups of the San Diego Crew Classic, and that the team will be fighting for a berth in the classic\u2019s finals on April 1 off Crown Point.\u00a0 UCSD scored convincing victories in the city championships and the Opening Day Regatta at Newport Beach the last couple of weeks. The varsity eight boat defeated second-place USD by a full nine seconds on Feb. 24 and outclassed UC Santa\u00a0Barbara, UC Irvine, Long Beach State and San Diego State at Newport Beach on March 3.\u00a0\u00a0 Johnson said the team is recruiting throughout the country and has 20 freshmen. In addition, they have received transfers from Drexel and Loyola Marymount and a couple from junior colleges. For more information, visit www.crewclassic.org.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Progressively, rowing coach Zach Johnson believes his UC San Diego crew is about ready to venture into the collegiate Pac 12\u00a0stronghold that includes California State Berkeley and University of Washington, winners of eight of the last 10 national championships. “Honestly, we\u2019re not quite at that level,” said the Tritons coach, who is now entering his […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":292642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11559","_seopress_titles_title":"UCSD ready to flex muscle ahead of bid to join Pac 12","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11559,11551,11553],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-292641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beach-bay-press","category-news","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}