Ledyard — There was a point in the conversation early Wednesday afternoon, on the porch of his team's Gales Ferry headquarters, that Yale University coach Steve Gladstone brought up the concept of tipping your cap to an opponent in defeat.

It's something Gladstone did often after taking over the Bulldogs' rowing program in 2010, with Yale in the midst of losing 14 of 15 editions of the Harvard-Yale Regatta — the nation's oldest intercollegiate sporting event, born in 1852.

“A lot,” Gladstone said of his cap-tipping superiority. “We were slow the first year. We were slower the second year. The first three years here we were not competing.”

He called the Gales Ferry residence where the team trains for the regatta “a shanty town” when he arrived.

“This place was symbolic of where it was. It was a metaphor. It was in pretty bad shape,” Gladstone said.

Now, this Saturday, Yale enters the 153rd Harvard-Yale Regatta as the defending champion. The favorite. The Bulldogs won their second consecutive Intercollegiate Rowing Association national championship Sunday on Mercer Lake in West Windsor, N.J., beating top-seeded Washington by more than a length.

The Harvard-Yale Regatta, contested over four miles — a contrast from the IRA's 2,000-meter course — is scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. It will be rowed upstream, from the Gold Star Bridge to Bartlett's Cove, with the third varsity race (4:45 p.m.) and the second varsity race (5:30 p.m.) preceding it. The combination race is slated for 6 p.m. Friday.

So how, exactly, did Gladstone, in his eighth season at Yale but the architect of 13 national championships overall in his distinguished career, transform the Bulldogs back into a competitive enterprise?

“People. People with the right attitude,” Gladstone said. “People who love what they're doing and have a burn to do it. (When I got here), there were two or three people who had a sense of what it took.

“I came back here and looked around and it was a beautiful place. If you're a rowing person, this is the mother church. This is where it all began. It was an appealing challenge. Some of my good friends in rowing said, 'Why do you want to go back there?'

“I told them, 'My desire to coach is bigger than my ego.'”

This year's senior class, including two members of the varsity boat, were part of the changing of the guard.

Sholto Carnegie, a 6-foot-6 senior from Oxford, England, will row in the stroke seat Saturday. Paul Jacquot, the 6-foot-8 senior captain from Chalon-sur-Saone, France, will command the fourth seat. Both have spent their entire careers in the varsity boat, setting a course record upstream (18 minutes, 35 seconds) as freshmen and breaking Harvard's stranglehold on the race. Their sophomore season, the race was stopped when the Harvard boat was swamped, with no official result declared. Last season, Yale was back on top, edging Harvard by five seconds.

“His pitch was, 'We're going to build Yale to be the best program in the United States,'” Carnegie said, asked how Gladstone sold his recruits. “We won (Harvard-Yale) in my freshman year, so that was a big turning point. Yale hadn't won that since 2007. That's what it's all about. Seeing the progression of the program.”

“Definitely Steve Gladstone himself,” Jacquot said of what drew him to the Yale program. “But there is a vibe on this team. It's the guys, it's just the way we interact here. Racing is a bit of a grind, but we've really enjoyed the whole process, going out and training with your friends and teammates. I want to be happy to go to practice.”

Jacquot said Gladstone's mission since he arrived at Yale was to turn things around. And there was certainly a precident.

Gladstone won five national championships at Brown (1982-94) and six at Cal (1973-80, 1997-08) before adding back-to-back titles at Yale.

“The trick to this, which is tricky,” Gladstone said of the program reboot, “how do you attract people to say, 'look, this is going to change?' We got some guys and they said, 'Well, let's give it a try.' I don't think I'm a great recruiter. (Assistant coach) Sam Baum played a great role in that.

“You can say, 'other places I coached, he's been very successful.' You can create a narrative. … It was a long time. It wasn't overnight.

“Yale is now holding up its end of the bargain. For years and years, Harvard was keeping this thing going. One of the things that's really good right now is that both crews are good. There's some question who's going to win.”

v.fulkerson@theday.com