2025 Youth Preview

The 2025 racing season for high-school, junior, and youth crews in the United States reaches its peak at the USRowing Youth National Championships, June 12-15, at Nathan Benderson Park in Sarasota.

Over 4,000 youth athletes from 224 rowing programs qualified for Youth Nationals through 12 qualifying regattas last year, with similar numbers—and some adjustments—expected this year.

The winning crews will be many of the same names that have won most of the many youth national champion titles handed out by USRowing in recent years.

This year, Marin Rowing Association, Princeton National Rowing Association/Mercer, and St. Joseph’s Prep will be top competitors for the men’s youth eight, the premier event.

RowAmerica Rye, Saugatuck Rowing Club, and Greenwich Crew rank among those most likely to win the other premier event, the women’s youth eight.

All six were in the A final of Youth Nationals last year, and they all finished at or near the top of the youth eights fields at the Head of the Charles in the fall. Any one of another half-dozen crews, like NorCal, Central Catholic, Sarasota, Saratoga, St. Andrews, Newport Aquatic Center, or Newport Sea Base could be top performers at Youth Nationals.

“It is so hard to predict these things,” said Parker Washburn, the girls varsity rowing coach (and dorm parent and physics teacher) at Deerfield Academy, the top scholastic program at the 2023 Youth Nationals. “But looking over some of the results from last spring and this fall, it seems that those schools and clubs had good speed heading into the winter.”

“I am mindful that every year is different,” said Sandy Armstrong, executive director and U19 girls head coach at Marin Rowing Association, where she has coached for 37 years. “We’re in a good position to have the speed we need, but are still developing.”

Marin has a good though small group of young athletes who progress every day and are “fun,” Armstrong said. But there is no shortage of fast crews between them and a win in Sarasota.

“We have a ton of respect for our competitors across the board.”

Occurring the last weekend of March this year, the San Diego Crew Classic is the first major benchmark event of the season for youth crews. The 2025 edition—the biggest yet, with 430 entries—features 13 women’s youth eights, including Connecticut Boat Club, Marin, Marina, Newport Aquatic Center, Norcal, Oakland Strokes, and Saugatuck. The men’s youth eight event has attracted a similarly competitive field of 11 crews from across the country.

“San Diego will be pretty telltale,” Armstrong said.

Large and well-run clubs, as opposed to school crews, have come to dominate youth rowing in the United States. Last year, the 2024 USRowing Youth National Championship Regatta offered national championship titles in 45 events and awarded 41 of them. (There were no entries in three of the seven Para events, none in the mixed-youth inclusive double.) Of those 41, 33 were won by clubs, eight by school crews—mostly scullers.

For 2025, 39 “national champion” titles are at stake at Youth Nationals, across three age categories—U16, U17, and U19—and including, curiously, “national champion” events for second varsity crews, which means titles for those who aren’t the best even in their own programs.

RowAmerica Rye, a private for-profit rowing club in Rye, N.Y., lived up to its tagline “Be a part of our success” by qualifying crews to race in 19 events at last year’s Youth Nationals, winning four—including both premier events—and earning spots on the podium in six additional events.

“It was a good run for us,” said RowAmerica Rye head coach Marko Serafinmovski. “I hope for similar success this year. We focus on what we can do. We want the kids to row well, primarily.”

Of the 224 schools and clubs that qualified for and entered last year’s Youth Nationals, most had only one or two crews racing at the event. But 12 clubs qualified and raced 10 or more crews each, placing high enough at the dozen regional regattas to earn entry to Youth Nationals.

Those dozen super-clubs and their fleets of qualifying crews—Community Rowing, Inc. (10), Greenwich Crew (14), Los Gatos Rowing Club (14), Maritime Rowing Club (15), Norcal Crew (11), Norwalk River Rowing Association (10), Oregon Rowing Unlimited (13), RowAmerica Rye (19), St. Andrew Rowing Club (12), Sarasota Crew (14), Saugatuck Rowing Club (13), and Whitemarsh Boat Club (11)—could by themselves hold a regatta bigger than the IRA or NCAA collegiate national championships. Another dozen or so clubs like Marin, Oakland Strokes, and PNRA/Mercer could well qualify 10 or more crews this year.

They are fast and successful in the same ways clubs in other sports are competitive: They employ and support professional coaches, they attract large numbers of athletes from high-achieving families, and they train specifically for one sport, year-round.

“As soon as you walk in here, you know what you need to do—give 100 percent,” said Serafinmovski. “We don’t have coaches that are just here to get a paycheck. Our eight coaches’ hearts are 100 percent in it.”

St. Louis Rowing Club, founded on the Mississippi River in 1875, now features vibrant masters and junior programs of over 100 rowers each. A successful youth club and collegiate oarsman before becoming a professional coach, Tim Frank said his boys and girls crews this year “have a lot of potential, although we graduated some good seniors.”

Frank coaches both the boys and girls crews, a heavy workload, “but I love it.” Last year, St. Louis won both the women’s varsity eight and four at the Midwest Junior Rowing Championships on Ohio’s Harsha Lake on its way to Youth Nationals.

At the 2024 USRowing Central Youth Championships, Dallas United Crew won the men’s youth eight and finished first and second in the men’s second varsity youth eight.

“We have been working diligently to move pieces into place to defend our titles in the eights,” said DUC men’s head coach Ben Williams, after 10 of the 16 winning oarsmen graduated from the program.

“I’m confident we’ll have great competition in the Texas Rowing Center and OKC Riversport men’s eights. There’s lots of horsepower in those crews, and being led by strong coaches in Eric Dilworth and Chris Leonard, it would be more than naive to count them out.”

From year to year, a crew or two from the handful of top rowing schools—Deerfield Academy, Belmont Hill School, New Trier High School, and others—qualifies, enters, and races in the A final at Youth Nationals—and perhaps even wins a medal. But the age of super-club dominance has arrived and established itself.

One of America’s top rowing high schools, St. Joseph’s Preparatory School in Philadelphia (“The Prep”), has taken an “if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em” approach under coach John Fife. After trying to race both a scholastic and club schedule in the same season, St. Joe’s quit racing in the Manny Flick series and Philadelphia City Championships on its home Schuylkill course, withdrew from the Philadelphia Scholastic Rowing Association, and has been pursuing a club-like training and racing program year-round.

Instead of racing clubs at Lake Mercer on a Saturday and rushing back to Philadelphia for a Sunday Flicks race as it used to, St. Joe’s is focused on being a youth team, Fife said, with the traditional Stotesbury Cup Regatta the only remaining scholastic event on the The Prep’s schedule. The USRowing Mid-Atlantic Youth Championships, which the Philly rowers won on their way to a silver-medal performance at Youth Nationals last year, is now the regional qualifier for St. Joe’s

In March, Fife took his top two eights—St. Joe’s is all male—on a spring-training trip to Sarasota, where they scrimmaged (successfully) Sarasota Crew and Belen Jesuit at Nathan Benderson Park while staying in a hotel within walking distance of the course.

St. Joe’s will race club crews, including a dual with Greenwich Crew, at Mercer Lake at different regattas on three weekends in March and April, followed by two more regattas, in Overpeck, N.Y. and Middletown, Del., before the Mid-Atlantic qualifier and Stotesbury Cup Regatta. It’s a fuller schedule than most colleges race, and it’s been working well for The Prep.

St. Joe’s won the men’s youth eight at the 2021 Youth Nationals, an inflection point for the program. On top of the long history of rowing at The Prep, for the past five or six years Fife has had good groups of leaders stepping up each year. They train year-round, with a full autumn racing schedule followed by intense winter training, before the all-important spring championship season. About 60 percent of The Prep’s oarsmen row and race together in the summer as Hawk Rowing Club, keying on racing at Royal Canadian Henley Regatta in August.

“It takes losing to learn to get faster,” said Fife about the transformation of St. Joe’s into more of a club program. “We lost, and realized we had to work harder and be better at this.”

“Rowing has gotten a lot faster in the last 30 years. We’ve recognized and embraced that.”

The original Henley, Great Britain’s Henley Royal Regatta, has been the reward trip for successful school crews traditionally. As Youth Nationals has evolved into a mostly club championship, successful scholastic crews are skipping it and doubling down on Henley trips.

“Why? The rise of year-round club rowing,” said a New England prep school coach, whose crews row only in the short spring season. “And if you aren’t competitive with the clubs, there’s no offsetting value of a cultural experience [at Youth Nationals] like there is at Henley.”

Beginning this year, scholastic programs have fewer paths to qualify for Youth Nationals, since USRowing removed three scholastic regattas from its list of qualifiers. The Philadelphia Scholastic Rowing Association, Virginia Scholastic Rowing Association, and the Scholastic Rowing Association of America left the national governing body’s insurance and membership programs after USRowing imposed new requirements and certifications. After the regattas quit USRowing, they were dropped from the list of qualifiers.

Also dropped this year were the two U15 events, men’s and women’s coxed quads. The national governing body’s explanation of the change noted that while U15 athletes represented only three percent of participants at last year’s Youth Nationals, they accounted for 66 percent of exclusions—”nearly all due to failures to yield during time trials,” a clear safety concern.

Experienced junior coaches wonder if more lower events might need to be trimmed as well.

“The regatta has gotten way too big; it needs to be pared down,” Fife said. “Athletes are spread out over too many different events; U15 and U16 don’t need a national championship. Nationwide, coaches want to make it simpler and more true, like the IRA.”

To fit all 853 boats into a four-day regatta, even with Nathan Benderson Park’s 10-lane course, Youth Nationals does away with heats, repechages, and normal semifinals and instead uses time trials to set A/B semifinals, sending everyone else directly to lower finals.

Conditions can, and do, change during the time it takes to run 30 crews down the course in a time trial. Using a time trial creates situations like last year’s in the men’s youth eight, in which New England Interscholastic Rowing Association champion Deerfield finished one-tenth of a second behind the 16th crew in the time trial. That landed Deerfield directly in the C final, which the Massachusetts boarding school won. If a crew fails to make the top 16 in the possibly variable conditions of the time trial, at Youth Nationals it’s sent straight to the lower finals for a single-race-only regatta experience.

“The regatta needs to refocus on making sure the right and best crews are competing for a national championship, rather than the number of crews competing at the regatta,” said Fife.

Armstrong agrees that the popularity of Youth Nationals and its growth through adding lower age categories “created a monster,” and she misses “the good old days of the top two crews from each region” gathering to decide the national champion more simply.

Armstrong is concerned also about the effects of putting national-championship pressure on younger and younger athletes. All the championship banners in her boathouse are nice, she said, but it’s “engaging parents at a new level that is not helpful.”

As their children achieve early rowing success, it pushes expectations and college recruiting earlier and earlier. Practically speaking, it’s as if novice coaches are teaching Learn to Row and trying to win a national championship all at once.

“It’s too much too soon and burning kids out,” Armstrong said. “We’re beginning to see kids leave and go to other sports.”

Armstrong and her colleagues will be spending time reviewing the program and “making sure we’re developing human beings healthfully and helpfully.”

Meanwhile, 39 new national champions will be crowned in June at the 2025 USRowing Youth National Championships.

The post 2025 Youth Preview appeared first on Rowing News.