James Wright (left) and Andrea Berghella near the end of a Youth National Championships heat race in the Germantown Friends double. (Photo by Tom Utescher)

by Tom Utescher

In their last outing in a school uniform this spring, a select group of scullers from Germantown Friends School and Springside Chestnut Hill Academy went up against the best of the best last weekend at the U.S. Rowing Youth National Championships.

Unlike events like the Stotesbury Cup Regatta and the Scholastic Rowing Association of America (SRAA) Nationals, the USR’s include not just crews with rowers who all attend the same high school, but also club crews that can concentrate talent from a number of different schools in the same boat. This gathering often takes place at a distant locale (Florida last year), but this time around Philly rowers simply had to hop across the Delaware to New Jersey’s Mercer Lake, located off of Route 1 between Trenton and Princeton.

Windy conditions had caused practice sessions to be cancelled on Thursday, and when the regatta actually got underway on Friday old Aeolus was at it again. The men’s doubles from SCH and GFS were able to get in their heat races before racing was suspended shortly after 11:00 AM.

In the lightweight category, the Blue Devils’ Hudson Smith and Damian Betancourt finished sixth, while in the open weight division, James Wright and Andrea Berghella of the GFS Tigers placed third.

Even as the regatta resumed at 2:00 PM after a delay of almost three hours, it was decided that even more powerful winds predicted for Sunday would preclude any racing on that day, and the schedule would be strictly truncated. The semifinals and finals would both be staged on Saturday, and one stage, the repêchage, would be eliminated altogether.

The “reps” provide a second chance for crews to feed back into the semifinals if they did not claim one of the top places in the heats. Their cancellation meant that boats with lower placings in the opening round would not get to race a second time.

The SCH men’s lightweight double became a victim of this single-elimination scenario, while the GFS tandem, with their third-place finish in one of four heats, became one of the 12 semifinalists in the regular men’s double.

When competition resumed after the official delay, the winds had not diminished. In one of the early contests after the restart, the women’s quad from SCH (Emma Lutz, Amanda Miller, Gabi Sciarrotta, Lisa Burckhardt) had to bid goodbye to Youth Nationals with a sixth-place finish in a seven-boat heat.

Of the six SCH scullers at Lake Mercer, four were just finishing their junior year, while Lutz and Sciarotta would be graduating on Tuesday, June 14.

One of the two GFS rowers, Wright, is a sophomore, but as a senior, Berghella was faced with a direct conflict with his own graduation ceremony, which took place on Friday morning.

He pointed out, “The SRAA Nationals (and the end of May) conflicted with our prom and this regatta conflicted with graduation, so I knew I’d have to give something up. I decided that I would miss graduation because this was a more important race.”

All three area boats that raced at Lake Mercer had done very well at the Philadelphia City Championships at the beginning of May, each winning a silver medal in its category. At the Stotesbury Cup Regatta a few weeks later, both the girls quad from SCH and the boys double from GFS placed fourth.

The Tigers’ Berghella, who will lend his 6’4” frame to Brown University in the coming years, was a swimmer during his middle school years.

GFS didn’t have a swim team, but he was part of the aquatics club at Friends Select School near his home in Center City Philadelphia. He saw a club teammate make a very successful transition from swimming to rowing, and with the fledgling crew program at Germantown starting to gather momentum, he climbed into a boat and soon felt at home.

Up until this season he rowed solo in a single, but this year Wright, two years younger, looked to be a good match for the senior in a two-man vessel.

“We had similar ergometer scores over the winter and we’re similar in height and length, so we worked out well in a double,” Berghella related.

“It was also good for me to have to learn to follow another rower in a boat. In college the racing is all in fours and eights, so it was helpful for me to start to make that adjustment this last year at GFS.”

There was an adjustment in training for both Berghella and his boatmate once they’d finished the Stotesbury Regatta. All spring they’d performed in 1500 meter races on the Schuylkill, with the river’s current behind them. For Youth Nationals, they’d be racing on a 2000-meter still-water course (the lake), so in addition to extending their practice pieces, GFS coach Aaron Preetam took them to train at a current-free venue, and on other occasions had them row upriver on the Schuylkill.

Even so, the winds at Lake Mercer presented some problems for the Tigers. For Wright, it was mostly a question of experience, while for Berghella it was his tendency to keep his oars relatively low in the recovery part of his stroke (extending the oars back to begin a new propelling “drive”). When there are higher waves and a larger wake his oar blades can make contact with the water, making his motion less efficient.

In the SCH lightweight double, Damian Betancourt (left) and Hudson Smith make their way back along the lake after a race. (Photo by Tom Utescher)

He noted “One of the things that impressed me about some of the boats we raced, like the ones that got the top three places, was that they were so good at rowing long and not letting the conditions affect them. They still were able to pull fast times.”

Advancing to the semifinal round thanks to their third-place outcome in their heat race, the Tigers came in fifth and thus moved into the B final. Here, their aforementioned difficulties caught up with them. By the later stage of the race, the finals field had broken in half, with GFS among the second group of three. A Jacksonville, Fla. tandem accelerated away from the other two over the last 50 or 60 meters to take fourth (7:05.015), while GFS came in sixth, half-a-tick behind Y Quad Cities rowing of Moline, Ill. (7:07.823 to 7:08.373).

Wielding the official finish line flag at the water’s edge were members of the Tigers’ girls lightweight crew.

Off the water, Berghella had a chance to touch base with Brown assistant coach Graham Willoughby, who was on hand to watch four of the Bears’ 10 incoming freshmen perform at Mercer Lake.

The new GFS grad will work out with Coach Preetam on the Schuyklill for the next few weeks and then will head over to his family’s home in Italy, where he has already made connections with a rowing club located a little outside of Rome.