Junior Rowers Ranked Amongst Best in Country at National Schools’ Regatta

The National Schools’ Regatta, widely regarded as the premier junior regatta of the season, saw many of our rowers put in some outstanding performances at the start of the half term break.

The National Water Sports Centre in Nottingham hosted the annual regatta for the first time in several years, after a move back from Dorney Lake. The event attracts over 5000 competitors with racing scheduled over three days.

Strong winds brought about challenging conditions on the lake over the two days of racing and lead to the officials cancelling Sunday’s entire programme. This was a massive blow and extremely disappointing to those who missed racing at all, including all our year 11 rowers and our Sixth Form Girls pair and Boys coxless four.

On Friday, our Year 10 pupils raced in the Junior 15 events, with crews seeded to finals from a time trial. The competition is fierce and just to make a final is an enormous achievement, so it was magnificent to see all our five crews progress through to a final, raced with six boats, side-by-side, over 2000 metres.

The results were excellent across all the boats with great finals and overall results ranking them among the top clubs and schools in the country. Our Girls First Quad Scull and the Boys Second Quad Scull both made the B-Final finishing 3rd and 5th, respectively, while our Boys First Quad, Girls Second Quad and our other Boys Second Quad all made C-Finals.

Saturday saw our Sixth Form Rowers take to the water and we had four boats racing across the day in the same format as Friday with time trials seeding finals. The Championship Coxed Four rose to the occasion, demonstrating their speed in the time trials and progressing the to A-Final. The raced well in the final and came sixth in the country in what is a brilliant result.

The second quad scull moved through to the B-Final and started well moving to the front of the field only for disaster to strike and a technical issue causing them to stop. Not to be defeated, the boys recovered and set about making up the couple of hundred metres lost to the others. To their credit they caught a boat, but the course ran out and they had to settle for 5th.

Our Championship Girls Coxed Four had a great C-Final finishing in third place, and our Championship Boys Quad Scull took 4th in the D-Final in what proved a frustrating event.

National Schools’ Regatta Results