The Los Gatos Rowing Club won three national championships to highlight an outstanding performance by the organization at the USRowing Youth National Championships on June 6-9 at Sarasota, Florida.
“This is the best year we’ve ever had, partly because we sent the most athletes we’ve ever sent,” said Jaime Velez, the club’s director of rowing. “This has definitely been our best regatta. … Across the board, we had strong racing.”
The club saw 59 athletes compete in 14 events, and placed 12 crews in the top eight in the country.
“It’s a testament to the coaching staff, the support of the parents, and the training these athletes do,” Velez said. “They train six days a week, from September to the national championships, and a lot train through the summer also. They don’t take much days off. These results show the fruit of their labor throughout the season.”
Los Gatos won national championships in the Men’s Youth Quad-x division, Men’s Youth Second Varsity Quad-x and Women’s Youth Second Varsity Quad-x. The youth division is the 19-and-under age group. X means it’s a sculling event in which each rower has two oars. All of the Los Gatos squads that placed seventh or higher were in A Division finals. All the races at the national championships were 2,000 meters.
“Every single one of the victories that we had were extremely close, and (we) showed a lot of grit in the middle of the race,” Velez said.
The Los Gatos Men’s Youth Quad-x team was comprised of Kyle Brown (Los Gatos High), Leonard Shetler (Saratoga), Aidan Roberts (Summit Tahoma-San Jose) and Diego Lasso (Los Gatos). They produced a finals time of 6 minutes, 13.100 seconds.
“They got silver the past two years by small margins,” Velez said. “They’ve been building for years for (a national championship) and to break through like that was huge.”
The Men’s Youth Second Varsity Quad-x team included Dillon Yoo (Los Gatos), Nolan Hamm (Los Gatos), Carl Lewis (Fusion Academy-Los Gatos) and James Tiglao (Leigh). Their finals time was 6:27.98.
In the Women’s Youth Second Varsity Quad-x division, the boat sat Frieda Cramer (German International School of Silicon Valley-Mountain View), Scarlett Coke (Westmont), Alexandra Buchowski (Los Gatos) and Gigi Musolf (St. Francis-Mountain View). They produced a finals time of 7:20.16.
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Velez pointed out that the Women’s Youth Quad-x team, which placed second in 7:07.17, has improved its place in the national championship race three years in a row. It was fifth in 2022 and fourth last year. The squad consisted of Emerson Adams, Lucie Boillet, Eleonora Fasoli and Harriet Cheetham.
Another Los Gatos boat that claimed silver medals was the Women’s Under 15 Quad-x with a coxswain. The team consisted of Annette Lee, Anika Phadnis, Zoe Ruelas, Isabelle Vallancey and Pearl Skowrinek.
The Los Gatos Rowing Club is comprised of approximately 145 middle school through high school athletes and also about 120 athletes over 18 years old, according to Velez.
“We are a no-cut program,” he said. “Everyone competes, everyone practices.”
The team draws from over 30 schools, including ones as far away as Gilroy.
“Our athletes are amazing,” Velez said. “The sport rewards hard work and consistency.”
Here are the other Los Gatos Rowing Club teams that competed at the youth national championships:
Men’s Under-17 Quad-x: bronze, 6:41.28 (Liam Austin, Cameron Brown, Cameron DeGraff, Nicholas McKinnon)
Men’s Under-17 Four with a coxswain: 4th, 7:01.82, 0.53 seconds from third (Chad Knauss, Nico Della Ratta, Kealan Chiu, Declan McInerney, Kaira Yoo)
Women’s Under-17 Quad-x: 4th, 7:32.76, 1.01 seconds from third (Aretha Liu, Julia Valencia, Jenna Yoder, Ines Madson)
Men’s Youth Second Varsity Quad-x B: 6th, 6:36.57 (Gavin Hartman, Hayden Santos, Jasper Powell, Daniel Milligan)
Men’s Under 15 Quad-x with a coxswain: 6th, 7:38.74 (Henry Monk, Simon Stokes, Anthony Theakanath, Simon Habrat, Victor Habrat)
Men’s Under 16 Quad-x with a coxswain: 7th, 7:17.97 (Wyatt Keller, Aleksander Shetler, Luke Degraff, Matthieu Boillet, Ian Feezor)
Women’s Under 16 Quad-x with a coxswain: seventh, 8:19.22 (Rylan Clevenger, Sophia Juarez, Alexis Pirooz, Nar Ucar, Natalie Dischler)
Women’s Youth Second Varsity Quad-x B: 10th, 7:47.42 (Sofia Clark, Ruby Bogonovich, Nainica Kapoor, Eva Radov)
Men’s Youth Pair: 24th, 7:26.36 (Dylan West, Dominique Harrison)
