You’re not supposed to peek out of a boat mid-race, but that’s what Fox Chapel junior Daniel Andrud did when his Three Rivers Junior Rowing team, a group of four, was about halfway through a 2,000-meter race.
He saw his team, including David Scheatzle of Winchester Thurston, Preston Heyse of Mt. Lebanon and Michael DeGregorio of Shady Side Academy, keeping pace with the lead boat at the Midwestern Youth Championship Regatta.
“I shouted to David, in front of me, our stroke seat, and I guess the rest of the boat, I just started shouting ‘Gold, gold, gold,’ because we were there,” Andrud said. “We weren’t expecting that at all. And so crossing the finish line, it was definitely all-out excitement. I was shouting, Michael was shouting, David, right after the race, he was like ‘Wait, did we really win?’ And it was a lot of fun, and when we went to go dock our boat after the race, all our teammates came out from the beach and swam out to us.”
The group, Three Rivers Junior Rowing’s men’s varsity quad, placed first with a time of 6 minutes and 32 seconds May 20.
Because of multiple rain-outs, the team didn’t have many opportunities to practice for the race with that specific lineup. Given the limited practice time on the river, the results were a little surprising to Andrud.
“We practiced it, I would say, three or four times,” Andrud said. “So I don’t think going into midwest, we were expecting that outcome. We had semis, where we raced other crews and see how we stack up against other heats, and pulling into the dock after that semi, our teammates were telling us that we had the second-fastest time by .1 seconds.”
The men’s novice double boat (CB Roman and Jacob Bair of Winchester Thurston) also placed first. In total, Three Rivers Junior Rowing earned 10 medals and advanced five boats to nationals, which will take place June 8-10 on Lake Natoma in Gold River, Calif.
Including the men’s varsity quad, the women’s varsity pair (Jess Volcheck, Hampton, and Annie Trainer, Oakland Catholic), men’s varsity pair (Ben Farnan, Quaker Valley, and Alec Roces, Mt. Lebanon), women’s lightweight double (Angie Mico, Oakland Catholic, and Audrey Lyda, Ellis) and women’s varsity 4+ (Annika Christensen, Quaker Valley, Tessa Kimmy, Quaker Valley, Tori Trovato, Quaker Valley, Julia Casey, North Hills, Maya Frizzell, Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School) will advance to nationals.
The club practices by Washington’s Landing, training on the Allegheny River close to the Highland Park Bridge all the way down to the Point. The river flooded significantly four times, coach Matthew Grau said, twice flooding the bottom few inches of their boathouse, where equipment is stored.
The weather forced them inside to train with weightlifting and indoor rowing machines.
“I was exceptionally proud of them,” Grau, in his first year as youth coach, said of all his rowers. “With the rivers flooding multiple times this year, Pittsburgh’s a cold weather place and we compete against a lot of places that have better weather. We had to do a tremendous amount of work inside, indoors.”
Sarah K. Spencer: sspencer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @sarah_k_spence.
First Published: June 1, 2018, 11:00 a.m.
