In Buffalo, Summer Rowing Is Back

Three years ago, a pair of oarsmen from Buffalo upset the favored U.S. National Team pair to win the 2021 USRowing Summer National Championship U19 event.

Rival Buffalo coaches R.J. Rubino of Buffalo Scholastic Rowing Association (BSRA) and Ryan Ficorilli of West Side Rowing Club had joined forces to return Buffalo summer rowing to its prior glory and with the upset victory they knew they were on to something.

“It’s the old rowing scene getting its juice back,” said Rubino—thanks to RowBuffalo, which he called “disruptive and new.”

RowBuffalo is the summer program that operates out of Buffalo Scholastic Rowing Association’s Patrick Paladino Memorial Boathouse on the Buffalo River. After adopting the name in 2023, RowBuffalo continues Buffalo Scholastic Rowing Association’s summer successes, racing at various USRowing summer championship regattas and Canadian Henley. The summer roster has grown from 35 athletes to over 100 in three years.

At this summer’s 140th Royal Canadian Henley Regatta, North America’s premier summer event, RowBuffalo won six events, proving that Buffalo rowing is back.

Earlier in the summer, RowBuffalo won the men’s youth eight and defended its 2023 title in the men’s U17 coxed four at USRowing’s RowFest in Oklahoma City. Esther Littlefield and Sophie Pirigyi captured RowBuffalo’s first women’s national titles, winning both the U23 and senior women’s pair by large margins.

The senior eight victory at Canadian Henley was the first for a Buffalo crew since 1956. The crew sped down the course in a blistering 5:33 (Great Britain won the Paris Olympics in 5:22), finishing ahead of Mendota Rowing Club in second by open water and local powerhouse, St. Catharines Rowing Club in third. Calgary, Western Ontario, and Vesper rounded out the final field.

The crew—coxswain Teddy Hibbard, stroke Peter Spira, Lars Finlayson, Wilder Fulford, John Wright, Preston Darling, Jackson Cheetham, Nathanial Sass, and bowman Collin Hay— came together from Harvard, Penn, Cal, Stanford, Los Gatos Rowing Club and Canisius High School and have rowed on U.S and Canadian national teams.

The win continued a three-year streak by men’s eights, including the lightweight eight in 2022 and the championship eight in 2023. RowBuffalo also won the U19 men’s eight, the U19 men’s coxed four, the championship men’s pair, the U23 lightweight men’s straight four, and the senior lightweight men’s dash eight.

Since 1912, West Side Rowing Club has been the epitome of Buffalo rowing. The storied club dates from Buffalo’s most prosperous era and has been redeveloped repeatedly, including relocation to accommodate a sewage-treatment plant in the 1920s, destruction by a 1975 fire, and the 2007 construction of the Fontana Boathouse, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (originally for the University of Wisconsin). Located across town, BSRA had been a separate part of the Buffalo rowing scene before the advent of RowBuffalo.

A fifth-generation Buffalo resident, Rubino is a redevelopment project himself, of the athletic sort. Originally an ice hockey player who “liked the hitting and checking better than the goal-scoring,” Rubino rowed at Buffalo’s Canisius High, on the U.S. Junior National Team, and at Mercyhurst College before a back injury forced him to hang up his rowing trou.

“Most great coaches aren’t happy with how their rowing careers went,” Rubino told the Buffalo Rising podcast.

Now Rubino has earned his way back to the sport, with the growth of BSRA and RowBuffalo enabling him to shuck his “corporate job” and coach and organize rowing full time.

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