The outlook for St. Ed’s rowing team remains fluid as the group heads off to Canal 54 in Fellsmere on Saturday to participate in the Brevard Cup races for its final tune-up prior to the Florida Scholastic Rowing Association State Championships in Sarasota on April 25.
Over the past two seasons St. Ed’s has qualified boats for the Scholastic Rowing Association of America National Championship Regatta. This year the nationals will take place on the Cooper River in Camden, NJ. Whether any Pirate crews will earn a bid for that trip is anybody’s guess at this point.
“It has been a very different type of season this year,” head coach Aaron Lee said. “We knew it would be when we graduated about a third of the team from last year. Eight kids graduated and several of them went on to row at pretty big-deal programs in college. We knew that this year we were going to have to do a lot of work to get back to that same level.”
The “level” that Lee referred to was the expectation that the top boys and girls crews would make it to the scholastic national championships. That is exactly what occurred last year. In 2013 St. Ed’s boys varsity 4+ boat finished fifth in the nation.
Those highlights came in Lee’s third and fourth year as head coach. It was a rapid rise to national prominence for a program barely a decade in the making. This year got off to a rocky start.
“One problem we weren’t expecting was the weather,” Lee recalled. “In February we lost two whole weeks out on the water. There was too much wind. We also had to cancel an early regatta. To be honest it’s been kind of a difficult season.
“Like a lot of teams at St. Edward’s, we are hoping to follow the school tradition of starting out slow, getting better in the middle, and peaking at the right time.”
In a regatta on Turkey Lake in Orlando earlier this month, St. Ed’s competed against 150 crews from 15 clubs in their district. Those races were seen as a barometer for States. Afterwards Lee said, “We have some work to do, but we know what needs to be done. The question is: Can we get it done in time for the state championships? The goal is still to make it to Nationals.”
Lee seems genuinely baffled about how far this group can go. He doesn’t want to compare this team to the past two that achieved such great success for the program. One thing he does see, however, is a unity of purpose with this current band of 26 boys and girls.
“We’ve got a really committed group of kids,” Lee said. “There is this impression from the outside that we have a cult-like environment. I can see where it looks like that because inside our team these kids are completely committed to each other. They aren’t doing it for me, they aren’t doing it for anybody else, they are doing it for each other. They are working as hard as they can for their teammates. And that’s what this sport is really all about.”
The girls varsity 4+ boat with the best chance at States has Paige McGuire, Valerie Burke, Caroline Campione and Maggie Taylor as rowers. Coxswain Paul Siegl is a novice, as are Burke and Campione.
McGuire and Taylor were on the crew that made it to New Jersey last year. McGuire, a senior, is in her second year and Taylor, a sophomore, has been rowing since 7th grade.
“In my first year of rowing I began on a whim,” University of South Carolina bound McGuire said. “I wanted to be on a competitive spring team when I decided not to play club volleyball. I’m really enjoying it this year. We have three novices but you can’t really tell. They are all improving tremendously.
“We raced some of our competitors at Turkey Lake and we were a few seconds behind. We are looking to improve by the time we get to States.”
The boys and girls will each have two boats competing in Sarasota. Lee had to do some last-minute shuffling with his boys crews. Senior Sean Kenney was conflicted about the double booking of his graduation ceremony and the national regatta for the same weekend in May. His family weighed in.
“Sean and his family talked about things and decided that graduation is just too important to their family to miss,” Lee explained. “This will change our team plans so that Gunther Read, Francesco Sandri, Tyler Zudans and Michael Burke will be a Junior 4+ and will be St. Ed’s best chance for making Nationals on the boys side this year (with Rachel Gambee as coxswain). Sean will still be competing at States in another boat.”
Junior Read hopes for another trip up north. “This is my third year on the rowing team and last year was extremely successful. This year we’ve done all right even though we haven’t had much time out on the water. States will be the most important regatta of the year. I believe we’ll have a strong showing.”