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By MEGAN N. WALDE Students disappointed after finishing 6th in national competition For six months, they ate six meals a day. Six days a week, they lifted and pumped and pushed and pulled, working the arms, the legs, the back - especially the back. And every single afternoon, they slid into a sleek copy of their pride, the boat they call "Ingenuity," pulling themselves endlessly through the smooth, glassy top of the lake at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. They sweated and grunted with the effort, but still, they're not traditional athletes. They're engineering students. And before they got as far as the take, starting back in August, they left their bodies behind and focused their minds on a single task: how to design Ingenuity so that it could be the fastest, sleekest, best-made canoe at the national competition in Golden, Colorado. That might not have been such a tough task if the boat didn't have to be made out of concrete. But that is the task every year for every school that wins a spot at the American Society of Civil Engineers/Master Builders National Concrete Canoe Competition. UAH's team was one of 26 this year, and it's no stranger to the competition. With four national titles, UAH is tied with the University of California-Berkeley for the most wins.
Associted Press Photo: Andre Danson waxes away paddle marks from the side of the University of Alabama in Huntsville's concrete canoe before racing in Lakewood, Colorado, on Monday.
A win this past weekend would have meant crowning UAH the all-time champion. It would have gone a long way in cementing this small Alabama school as a true equal of bigger, better-known universities and engineering programs in the nation. But it was not to be. "This definitely was not one of the best years," team member and coach Jon Coign said. Simple beginnings The team started as a student club in 1986. It competed against bigger schools with bigger budgets, schools that already had formed official chapters of the program sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The team's first boat, named "Humongous," was a 12-foot whopper at 450 pounds. Humongous placed last at the Southeast regional competition. But UAH made it to nationals just two years later. Since then, the team has set countless records in the region and at the national level. Since 1991, UAH has represented the region at nationals nine times, winning or placing second in seven of those years with boats like "Fastrack," "Rock-It," "Defender" and "KnotCrackin’." The season started this year in August, with the first series of concrete testing. For a few months, team members did "plate tests," measuring durability and weight of different concrete mixes. The goal is to get a mix that is flexible and light, but strong and able to stand up to long periods of' time in the water. Once the mix is found and canoe designers of the club have worked out a sketch, it's time to make a model. A foam model is used to create the prototype, which would end up as the team's practice boat. But the prototype also serves a second purpose: to bring attention to any design flaws that should be fixed before competition in Ingenuity. After all, she is made of concrete, and Nature wants her to sink. The very phrase "concrete canoe" seems like an oxymoron, like the butt of a bad joke. "I know, the whole idea sounds like a spoof," team UAH advisor John Gilbert said, "but it isn't like that." Doing what the laws say man should not be able to is the main goal of concrete canoe design and the competition. "Obviously, you're going to use your technical skill," Coign said. "It's about learning and getting experience, not just the cutthroat competition." Gilbert agrees that students learn real-world application from the competition. Students aren't the sole beneficiaries of the research they put into a boat. Companies pay close attention to the technology that comes to the national competition each year, and sponsors are investing in future engineers. "The competition is rewarding and (the work) makes you a better engineer," team member Stuart Johnson said. Preparing for victory After the regional competition in March, the UAH team took a brief breather, then set about making repairs and adjustments to Ingenuity. They continued a strict regimen of exercise and paddling practice, but the main focus was the boat. She had to be stripped of her painted skin and reworked, then repainted. That process takes days because team members have to remove the "orange peel," a rough film left from the paint, with hours of meticulous hand sanding of every inch of Ingenuity. The week before competition, team members like Andre Danson stayed up for several days at a time working on the boat or the display, stopping briefly to eat and catch a nap. They worked night and day, nearly up to the minute they packed their cars and headed for Colorado with Ingenuity resting calmly in her pink foam and wood coffin in the back of a trailer. Besides the boat itself, the team had to prepare the other pieces of the national competition package. The canoe races are only part of the competition, worth about 30 percent of a team's total score. Teams must also explain the technology behind their boat, sell their idea as the best and do it all with style and grace. "You just might have the best product," Gilbert said, "But if you don't market it right, it may still not work for you." A display explains the mechanics of how the boat works, from the concrete mix chosen to the hull's design. UAH's this year was a computerized whirl of interactive pieces that told the whole story of Ingenuity. Team members thought they had the display part down, that a high placing was inevitable. It didn't turn out that way. "That was a real shocker," Coign said. "I thought we had a very good display, but in retrospect, when I look back, I am not sure it was the best we could do," Gilbert said. "Hindsight is pretty good, you know. I can see where the judges might give points to some other schools who did more creative things." An oral presentation by two team members answers the. judges’ questions about the school’s product, and a design paper goes through every technical detail. The presentation this year took chances, like using rock music by Pat Benatar in the background, and the team thought the risks would yield high returns. They didn't. The team finished eighth in the display, fourth in the final product and in the design paper and out of the top 10 for the oral presentation. It finished sixth overall, its poorest showing since 1991. It may have been the rain on race day, or the altitude. Maybe it was the uneasiness of losing a teammate shortly before competition; one strong paddler couldn't make the trip because of work obligations. Maybe the team members just tried too much, worked too hard, had too little time. "We tried some ideas and they just didn't work out for us," Johnson said. Whatever the reason, team members aren't really looking for excuses. "We did the best we could do, and we're not disappointed in each other," Johnson said. "We'd hoped for a better showing, but we're trying not get too down on ourselves. We've just got to look forward to next year." Which means some recruiting. Because many UAH students work full or part time, have families or commute to class, after-class activities like the canoe team have less participation than at other universities. Johnson hopes that getting more students involved will make the whole process smoother next year. "We had a lot of rookies there who watched from the distance," Gilbert said. "They keep saying they have all these ideas, so we'll see what works next year." "You live and learn, I guess."
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