It’s Either Cal or UW men, Stanford or Texas women

Either Cal or Washington will win each of the next two IRA national championships until the Olympics draws enough of their top international recruits home to train and be selected (they hope) for the LA2028 Games.

Even with a boat full of European giants who have rowed since they were boys, Harvard, coached by the great Charley Butt, has managed no better than runner-up to the West Coast duopoly since Covid canceled the IRA in 2020.

Only the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley, have been the national champions since then, and each has won every men’s heavyweight event at the IRA recently—first, Cal in 2023; then, Washington in 2024.

“It’s hard to beat Cal one day and Washington the next,” mused Butt at last year’s wind-whipped IRA. Harvard finished ahead of Cal in the Saturday semifinal when white-capping conditions (worst in the center lanes where the top-ranked crews raced) caused Cal to crab. Cal went on to post the fastest time of the regatta, a blistering 5:24, in the petite final.

The tailwinds at the 2025 IRA made times as unreliable as the racing conditions and compressed the finishing margins. But they didn’t change the final outcome from the year before. In the Sunday final, Washington finished ahead of Harvard for the second year in a row, 5:29.78 to 5:30.75.

Ever respectful and modest in his comments, Cal head coach Scott Frandsen likes how his crews are racing already this year after the first varsity went 5:26 against the University of California San Diego at the Redwood Shores Invitational on March 7.

Comparing times in rowing is rife with folly, but you have to be a fast crew to break 5:30, no matter the conditions. Cal has proven early in the season that it is fast. And deep: The Golden Bears raced six varsity eights at Redwood Shores. Frandsen has enough athletes to boat seven eights, he said, if no one is sick, injured, or otherwise unavailable because of the never-ending and random challenges that befall a program—like water unfit for racing in the seeded lanes.

“That’s outdoor sports,” Frandsen said. “That’s rowing.”

The latest challenge for Cal’s great rival, Washington, and much of the rest of the IRA grand-finals crews is roster limits. As college athletic departments try to adapt to chaotic rule and financing changes while still feeding the out-of-control budget beast that is college football, many are turning to roster limits, capping the number of student-athletes allowed to compete in varsity sports. Frandsen, working with rowing-aware athletic-department administrators, has managed to evade the axe that has chopped rosters at other programs. For now.

“A head coach’s No. 1 job is developing resources,” Frandsen said.

How those resources—roster size, recruits, money—translate to boat speed against two-time defending national champion Washington will be tested, and tested often, later this spring.

It’s the best and fastest rivalry in American rowing right now.

It’s also appreciated and valued by the rivals. When the University of Washington dropped the bombshell announcement in 2023 that it would be leaving the Pac-12 and joining the Big 10—a conference that does not include men’s rowing—the first call Washington coach Michael Callahan made was to Frandsen to assure him that the Huskies would always race Cal.

After the demise of the Pac-12, men’s rowing joined the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation, and what used to be the Pac-12 championship regatta is now the MPSF Men’s Rowing Championship. Cal won the first one last year, just weeks after losing to Washington in Seattle for the Schoch Cup.

Frandsen rowed at Cal, was an assistant coach at Cal, and succeeded coaching legend Mike Teti (hired away from USRowing after he coached the men’s eight to Olympic gold and bronze medals) as Cal’s head coach. In between, Frandsen rowed and won medals for Canada’s Olympic squad, including a silver in the pair at the 2008 Beijing Games with Washington alum Dave Calder.

Washington’s Michael Callahan has achieved similar greatness with Washington, where he rowed in college and coached as an assistant before succeeding his coach, Bob Ernst, who, over 40 years, guided both the Washington men and women, won eight national championships, and coached the U.S women’s eight to Olympic gold in 1984.

Callahan, while coaching Washington to a sweep of the 2024 IRA, also coached the U.S. men’s eight, which had failed to qualify for the Olympics at the 2023 worlds. He prepared the 2024 U.S. men’s eight for the last-chance qualifier in Lucerne, which they won, and then took them to the 2024 Paris Olympics, where they won bronze.

The Huskies and Golden Bears are scheduled to race practically every other week from the April 25 Schoch Cup to the MPSF regatta (May 16, 17) and then the IRA National Championship Regatta (May 29 to 31). Both programs could send crews to Henley Royal Regatta but probably should be racing in Lucerne at the World Rowing Cup, where they could make the A final racing against the world’s national teams.

The field is shallower in men’s Division III rowing, with eight crews racing at the IRA national championship regatta compared to the 24 in Division I, but the desire to win is the same. Last year, it was Trinity College’s desire to be better than ever that led coach Kevin MacDermott’s charges to the title. That, and some advantageous preparation.

In addition to greater commitment to training, Trinity raced at the 2024 Knecht Cup Regatta on the same racecourse in Camden, N.J., that would later host the IRA. With a full day of training on Friday and racing on Saturday and Sunday, the Bantams got more time on the championship course than they get on fully buoyed six-lane courses the rest of the year combined.

The 2025 DIII championship final was held on the same Saturday as the DI semi with terrible conditions, but their experience “made the IRA like a home race,” MacDermott said. “They’d been down that course so many times.”

Although a third of that championship varsity eight—the three-, six-, and seven-seats—graduated, this year’s squad is “pursuing with vigor” a repeat, MacDermott said. They’re “inspired to write their own legacy” and planning a Henley trip to mark the 50th anniversary of Trinity’s 1976 victory in the Ladies Challenge Plate.

Billy Boyce’s Harvard lightweights dispelled the canard that “lightweight rowing is always close because the athletes weigh the same” by crushing the competition in two years of undefeated racing, capped by back-to-back wins at the IRA national championship regatta in both the first and second varsity events. The Crimson lights went on to Henley, vanquishing Great Britain’s top rowing university, Oxford Brookes, en route to winning the Temple Challenge Cup.

There’s good reason to believe Harvard could three-peat as lightweight national champions, and a whole league full of reasons they might not. Cornell, second to Harvard at Sprints last year, before administrators kept the crew home from the IRA for disciplinary reasons, was second to Harvard again at the Head of the Charles. Dartmouth’s lightweights won the silver at the IRA, and coach Trevor Michelson has a small group of hard workers ready to go one better in 2026, despite the challenge of roster limits.

“It sucks,” Michelson said, “but we turn it into an advantage” with customized training programs for each athlete that have enabled the Big Green lights to score personal bests on the erg and other performance tests, like the Big Green’s on-water “Slim Fast” course.

“There are a lot of really good coaches in this league,” said Michelson of the lightweight league, which is now the pinnacle of the sport since its exclusion from the Olympics after the Paris Games. “A lot of different teams can win this thing. Everyone’s good. That’s what makes it fun.”

Also having fun in lightweight rowing are the Princeton women, who won their fourth-straight national championship in 2025. The Tigers won the lightweight coxed-four event at the Head of the Charles last fall but finished second to Radcliffe in the lightweight eights by over six seconds. Georgetown, Wisconsin, Boston University, MIT, and Sacred Heart all finished more than 30 seconds farther back.

Stanford vs. Texas

Stanford is the defending NCAA Division I national champions and entered the 2026 spring season ranked at the top of the coaches poll—rightfully. Texas is likely to be The Cardinal’s greatest obstacle for a repeat title, since the Longhorns return almost all of the youngest roster to race at NCAAs from last year and gain impressive additions to this year’s squad, including Maya Meschkuleit, the Canadian Olympic medalist and a member of Yale’s NCAA grand final-winning first varsity eight.

For the past six years, Stanford and Texas have been the top programs in women’s collegiate rowing, and rowing in general. Both crews beat the Canadian national team handily in a friendly race last spring, and coaches of the U.S. national team (which features alumnae of both) want no part of a potentially embarrassing race against either of them.

No one else has won the NCAA Division I championship since 2019, when Washington, coached by former Stanford head coach Yaz Farooq, won, with Texas finishing second.

Leading each program are two old friends-turned-intense rivals.

In 2016, Stanford coach Derek Byrnes moved from overseeing the very successful lightweight program, which he coached to two consecutive undefeated years capped by IRA championships (where lightweights have their nationals) to become head of all women’s rowing at Stanford after Farooq, who led The Cardinal to NCAA national championships, moved to Washington.

Texas coach Dave O’Neill also moved into his current position after winning national championships—two NCAA titles with Cal, where he coached for 16 years. In his first 10 years at Texas, he’s won three NCAA titles. This, his 11th year in Austin, very well could add to that total.

Of course, neither man rowed in the program he now coaches, nor did either attend the universities that now employ them. But no one puts more into coaching their crews than these two.

“For the last couple of years, I’ve seen a lot of both of them, and respect the hell out of both of them,” said Tennessee head coach Kim Cupini, whose Lady Vols finished fifth at last year’s NCAA championship. “They’re different personalities, but I’ve enjoyed working well with both.”

Cupini works with Byrnes and his light-hearted manner to coordinate their first real 2,000-meter race of the year, a regatta in which the coxswains arm-wrestle for lane choice in each event.

“We won all the lanes and lost all the rowing races last year,” she said.

Cupini spent the winter bantering with Byrnes, chirping each other by text and sharing fabricated images of “yoked up” coxswains doing pull-ups wearing chains.

Cupini also worked successfully with O’Neill to organize the inaugural SEC championship regatta in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

“He pushes us all to be better,” said Cupini, who called the SECs and the opportunity to race Texas before the NCAAs “phenomenal, a great opportunity.”

Last year’s league championship, based on team points, came down to the final of the first varsity eights race, which Texas won. Both programs received bids to the NCAA championships even though the SEC, with only four teams competing, is not an automatic qualifier.

“Racing both bookends our season,” Cupini said. “Stanford is our first 2K [March 28], and Texas is our last 2K [SECs, May 10] before NCAAs [May 29 to 31].”

Also racing in the NCAA championship regatta—this year on Georgia’s Lake Lanier (site of the 1996 Olympic regatta)—will be crews from Division II and III. Rowing is one of the only sports that runs the three championships at the same venue at the same time.

The events are not separate, and the fields are not combined. Instead, the NCAA regatta intertwines the heats and semifinals of the different divisions into a single schedule. With team hotels far from the racecourse, if the weather makes a mess of the regatta schedule as it did last year, student-athletes could be spending long days waiting around, taking lots of long bus rides back and forth, or both.

Defending Division II national champion Embry-Riddle entered the year ranked No. 1 in the coaches’ poll, and Grant Maddock, head coach of both the men’s DI program as well as the women, returns with his Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association DII Staff of the Year Sami Bay and Drayton Piper.

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University added rowing as a varsity sport only eight years ago when it moved from the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics to NCAA Division II. As a highly ranked STEM school, Embry-Riddle was attracted to the sport because the top rowing programs also are among the best academically. The 2025 rowing title is the school’s first NCAA national championship—and likely not its last.

All Division II rowing schools have notched a vital win already this year. Delegates at the NCAA Division II business session in January voted to approve an exception that allows women’s rowing and field hockey to continue to conduct championships.

In Division III, after winning the 2024 national championship on points and the 2025 national championship along with both first and second eights finals, the only higher accomplishment for Tufts is to three-peat.

Winning the collegiate-eight event at the Head of the Charles doesn’t get you anything come spring, but the Tufts women did it for the third straight year last fall, highlighting the depth and consistency head coach Lily Siddall has built with the Jumbos.

The spring racing season—the only one that matters to college varsity programs—begins earlier than ever, with racing for some crews under way in February. Top crews put down early markers at events like the Sarasota 2K and San Diego Crew Classic.

“It’s always great to get the season started,” said Mara Allen head coach at the University of Central Florida, after her crews won their first races of the season against Jacksonville. “I’m proud of the team for a good start to the year, and I’m excited for the rest of the season.” 

CHIP DAVIS is the founder and publisher of Rowing News. An oarsman from birth, he rowed on championship crews at St. Paul’s School and Dartmouth College, where he captained the lightweights. Now he sculls in Vermont when the weather is suitable and ergs the other half of the year.

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