©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Good SRAA showing for CHA, Springside crews
by TOM UTESCHER

Tom Samph (left) and Ryan Boutcher with the silver medal they took as a senior double at SRAA. (Photo by Alison Samph)

For Chestnut Hill Academy’s rowers, less turned out to be more.

Usually heavily invested in quads, CHA had its best results with a pair of two-man boats this spring, and at the Scholastic Rowing Association of America (SRAA) National Regatta at the end of May, the Blue Devils’ senior double won a silver medal, while the junior double took the bronze in their category.

A departure from the norm benefited sister school Springside as well. Also a quads outfit by tradition, the Lions switched a quartet of rowers from sculling to sweep rowing, and threw in a coxswain. The resulting junior four went through to the finals at Nationals and just missed a medal, finishing fourth.

CHA has been racing a junior double for several years, and current 11th-graders Will Rhoda (the stroke) and Chris Pittman (the bow man) have a lot of experience in this type of craft. The senior double, pulled by Tom Samph (stroke) and Ryan Boutcher, wasn’t put together until the middle of the 2006 season.

The two upperclassmen started out the spring in a senior (or varsity) quad, but eventually Blue Devils coach Steve McGuinn decided to break up that crew.

“The line-ups in the varsity quad weren’t producing the speed that Malvern and Roman [Catholic] were generating,” he observed. “We need to be realistic about our chances. Those guys row year-round, and we only have three or four months to prepare, and this year it was apparent that we weren’t going to make up that gap and really be in contention in the big races.”

The Samph/Boutcher combo clicked, giving Chestnut Hill a gold medal at the Philadelphia City Championships. The duo didn’t fare as well at the Stotesbury Cup Regatta. A few days before the event, they damaged their double during practice, and had to compete in a heavier boat they weren’t used to. Samph and Boutcher both run track as well as row, and the Inter-Ac championships fell on the second day of Stotes, another factor which put the Devils off their game.

In the regatta, they came in fourth in their semifinal section, failing to qualify for the medal race. Now, they had just a week to turn things around before the SRAAs.

“It was more mental than anything else,” McGuinn said. “They got so wound-up and high strung at Stotesbury that they had trouble focusing and their strokes fell apart. Before Nationals it was just a question of calming them down, getting them to row the way they’re capable of, and having them enjoy their last high school race, instead of getting uptight about it.”

Due to a limited number of entries in their class, Samph and Boutcher did not have to compete on Friday, May 26, the first day of the national regatta. The other two CHA/Springside entries saw action, though. Rhoda and Pittman won the second of two heats and advanced straight to the final. Their time of 5:51.90 was the third best overall out of this round.

Springside School’s junior four (from left) Emily Winant, Sarah Patches, Christine Giovinazzo and Karen Rothschild. Coxswain Sarah Stapleton is not visible in the photograph.

There were more crews competing in the junior four event, where senior coxswain Sarah Stapleton commanded four 11th-grade oarswomen: (stroke to bow) Emily Winant, Sarah Patches, Christine Giovinazzo, and Karen Rothschild. Springside finished second in one of four qualifying heats and recorded the eighth-best time, at 6:29.16. This moved the Lions on to the semifinal round on Saturday morning, where a third-place finish in 5:49.62 took Springside into the finals.

Back in the junior double, Saturday’s championship race was won by a dominant duo from North Jersey’s Don Bosco Prep, who were also gold medalists at the Philadelphia Cities and at Stotesbury. They crossed the wire in 5:22.23, with McClay, a Florida crew, coming in second (5:28.25) and CHA’s Rhoda and Pittman securing the bronze medal (5:30.93). Inter-Ac League rival Malvern Prep finished fifth in the race.

“Will and Chris gave up about 20 to 30 pounds per man to most of those other crews, but they definitely have speed,” McGuinn said. “We put a lot of time into adjusting the riggers and the overall mechanics of the boat this year, and that helped, too. These guys work well as a unit, and even though they have quirky little things they do, they do those quirky things together, so it doesn’t throw them off.”

When the Samph/Boutcher senior double raced for the first time on Saturday, it was apparent they’d made strides since Stotesbury, as they placed first in one of the three qualifying heats in 5:21.20. The Blue Devils had not been seriously challenged, and they knew they’d have to step it up in the medal race, since the other finalists all had faster times in the heats.

In the championship race, Boutcher recalled, “We were winning the race the whole time until there were about 300 meters left. That’s when Lakeport started to move on us and went into the lead.”

Lakeport, a crew from Ontario, had won the silver medal at Stotesbury, where Adam Scott, a school from the same Canadian province, had taken the gold. Scott didn’t race at Nationals, and Lakeport moved up to win the SRAA gold in 5:15.90. CHA, with a time of 5:22.87, took the silver ahead of the other Philadelphia-area schools in the race, Roman (third in 5:26.88) and Stotesbury bronze medalist Conestoga (fourth in 5:27.17).

The Springside four, a crew that had been put together only in April, was thrilled to be racing in the SRAA final.

“I think at first we were a little intimidated by our competition because we were a newly-formed boat and we were up against crews that had beaten us before,” noted Stapleton, the coxswain. “But we went up there and we actually did a lot better than we expected. We just went out each time and raced like that was going to be our last race.”

Pittsburgh’s Oakland Catholic, the Stotesbury champion, didn’t turn up in Saratoga, opening the door for Stotes silver medalist Denis Morris (yet another Ontario crew) to win the SRAA’s in a time of 5:49.31. The silver and bronze medals went to Gloucester, from Urbana, Va. (5:54.22) and St. Anthony’s, of Islip, N.Y. (5:57.87).

Springside, finishing in six minutes flat, missed a medal by two seconds, but came in ahead of the fifth-place New Yorkers from Shenendehowa (6:01.90) and the Lions’ Girls Inter-Ac League rival, Agnes Irwin (6:08.91). Irwin had won the gold medal at Cities over Springside, had made the Stotesbury finals while the Lions had not, and had finished one place ahead of the locals in the SRAA semifinal race.

“It felt good to get them in the end,” Stapleton said. “That was sort of a personal goal for us.”