Local rowers return to Henley Royal Regatta

Posted 7/25/16

Not far outside of the English town of Henley on Thames, members of the University Barge Club crew pose outside the 198-year-old Leander Club. From left are Neil McPeak, Wooley Pardoe, John Lipiros, …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

Local rowers return to Henley Royal Regatta

Posted

Not far outside of the English town of Henley on Thames, members of the University Barge Club crew pose outside the 198-year-old Leander Club. From left are Neil McPeak, Wooley Pardoe, John Lipiros, Logan Smith, Andy Kelly, Marty Schardt, Pete Seymour, Ryan Kirlin, and Mike Rossidis. Not far outside of the English town of Henley on Thames, members of the University Barge Club crew pose outside the 198-year-old Leander Club. From left are Neil McPeak, Wooley Pardoe, John Lipiros, Logan Smith, Andy Kelly, Marty Schardt, Pete Seymour, Ryan Kirlin, and Mike Rossidis.

by Tom Utescher

For the second year in a row and the third time in the past six years, Hill native and 2004 Chestnut Hill Academy graduate Pete Seymour celebrated most of the long July 4 weekend in England.

For anyone as devoted to the sport of rowing as Seymour, this made perfect sense, because right around the same time that Independence Day is celebrated in the U.S. each year, the focus of the worldwide crew community turns to the small town upriver from London that hosts the most iconic gathering in this sport, the Henley Royal Regatta.

Working out of his old high school boathouse on Philadelphia’s Kelly Drive, the University Barge Club, in 2011 Seymour became part of a group of post-collegiate athletes that travelled to Henley on Thames to race an eight-oared vessel at this venerated competition, which traces its origins back to the 1830’s.

They entered the Thames Challenge Cup event, a category in which the rowers cannot be members of an official national team and the crews are generally made up of oarsmen who are high-level amateurs whose experience and abilities place them just below the current top international grade.

University Barge’s 2011 venture was rather loosely organized, and the Philly oarsmen were pleased to reach the quarterfinal round.

A more serious, formally planned effort was mounted in 2015, when Seymour was joined by fellow CHA alum Marty Schardt (’09) and the crew was trained by former Hill resident Bill Lamb, who’d been a legendary scholastic coach at St. Joseph’s Preparatory School.

Last year’s UBC crew went through to the semifinal round on Saturday of Henley week, when they lost a close, hard-fought race against London’s Thames Rowing Club. Thames went on to an easy victory in the finals the following day, and most observers came to regard the earlier Thames/Barge battle as the true “final.”

The Philadelphia contingent ended their 2016 bid in a similar position, although their semifinal loss did not come against the eventual champion this time around. The racing at Henley follows a one-on-one, single- elimination (“knockout”) format, and UBC advanced through the first three rounds by defeating two British crews and one from China.

In the semifinals, they lost by one-third of a boat length to a Norwegian ensemble from Oslo, Norske Studenters Roklub (known as N.S.R. Oslo). In turn, the Norwegian crew lost by a wider margin in the finals to the home favorites from Molesey Boat Club, located a little southwest of London.

While the UBC line-up was made up of rowers who’d been out of college for some time and no longer had national team aspirations, some of the rival crews included younger athletes who were involved in the national developmental programs in their various countries.

Seymour related, “In recent years the Thames Cup has been attracting crews of a very high caliber, and the guys in our boat who raced there last year noticed a marked increase in the level of competition just from 2015 to 2016.”

Having raced the boat from China, and after getting to know a little bit about the Norwegian outfit that topped the Philadelphians in the semifinals, Seymour said, “There was a sense that the talent level had grown beyond the club-level standard that the Thames Cup event was originally intended for.”

Part of this Seymour attributed to the expansive and expertly-rendered video footage that has become prevalent just in the last few seasons.

“Obviously, Henley is very well known, but some of the You Tube videos have been really excellent, and they convey the excitement of the whole regatta and make even more people want to race there,” the CHA alum asserted.

After the positive experience the University Barge group had in 2015, it wasn’t that hard to reassemble most of the crew for another venture this season. Six of the eight rowers came back, along with coxswain Andrew Kelly, a Mount Airy native who’d won the high school event at Henley in 2000 as part of a St. Joseph’s Prep crew coached by Lamb.

A year earlier, Lamb had begun working with the UBC group after Kelly had told him of their plans, and this time he was involved from the get-go, training them through the fall and the winter. It also helped that most of the rowers had gone through the process before.

As Seymour pointed out, “The guys who’d been involved in 2015 had developed a good feel for how to budget their time to take into account the training workload, the demands of their ‘day’ jobs, and family time. We’d learned what was really effective with our training regimen and we were able to streamline the process somewhat.”

He added, “It takes a tremendous amount of effort to really mount a serious campaign, which is what you need to do if you want to have any kind of success. Everyone at UBC was excited about what we were doing, and it was gratifying to have the membership really get behind us and support us in a big way.”

Seymour had rowed at the University of Delaware following his CHA career, and Schardt went on to the crew at Trinity College, making a trip over to race at Henley during his days with the Bantams. In this year’s UBC boat, the other returning rowers from 2015 included stroke Neil McPeak, who’d been an accomplished oarsman at Penn (’09), former Philadelphia University rower Logan Smith (’13), and James “Wooley” Pardoe, who had raced at Henley in the scholastic event while at Kent School, and also as a collegiate rower at Brown.

Also back was John Lipros, a former member of the crew at Cornell (’04) who helped bring on board one of the two new UBC rowers, Mike Rossidis. Racing at Cornell just after Lipros finished up, Rossidis graduated in 2009 and a few years later his medical residency in the field of podiatry brought him to Philadelphia.

The other new member of the group was one of Lamb’s former St. Joe’s Prep rowers, Ryan Kirlin. He had gone on to row at Fordham, and had earned a seat in the U.S. lightweight four for the 2011 Pan American Games.

Having established their credentials for the Henley “stewards” the year before, the UBC rowers were able to skip the early qualifying races and start out in the regular heat racing that began on Wednesday, June 29. They’d need to win three of these daily heat races to get back to the semifinal round they’d attained in 2015.

They started out with a comfortable victory over the London Rowing Club entry, winning by nearly four boat lengths. The competition ramped up the following day, when the Philly boat won by one and one-third lengths over a Chinese crew, Fujian Rowing Club.

“They were more dangerous than that final margin suggests,” said Seymour. “Their approach was to really fire out to a strong start and try to discourage the other crew early in the race. You needed to maintain your focus and attack them in a disciplined manner, which we were able to do.”

There had been a fair amount of rain leading up to the regatta, and some of it continued into the event itself. This, and some headwinds on a few days, made the course tough to tackle, since at Henley competitors actually row upstream against the current.

“We felt that the conditions actually played to our advantage,” Seymour commented. “We had developed a deep well of strength and fitness that allowed us to battle the wind and the current in the middle of the course.”

The opponent for Friday’s quarterfinal race would be Quintin Boat Club, which operates out of a boathouse right on the Thames in West London. This band of Brits had advanced by winning by a length-and-a-half over a German crew that UBC had seen at Henley in 2015.

Seymour explained, “They were probably the crew that was most like us, guys with regular jobs who were pure club rowers and not part of any national developmental program.”

In general, University did not expend a lot of effort in sticking right with the fast starters at the outset of a race. They just wanted to remain within striking distance. Here, Quentin was ahead about one third of the way down the course.

“Coming up to the halfway point, we took a move, and we got the lead and were able to hold it,” Seymour said.

Winning by one length, the Philadelphians were into the Saturday semifinals, as in 2015. They had already observed that their rivals from Norway were very well-conditioned and rowed well together.

“We basically had the same game plan as before; we just knew that we’d have to execute it even better,” Seymour noted. “They looked a bit like us in that they were strong and consistent in the middle.”

In the quarterfinals, the Norwegians had held off a boat from Luzern, Switzerland by one third of a length, and they would ultimately prevail against the American crew by the same modest margin.

“To us, it was a great race all the way down,” Seymour related. “We were trading back and forth, moving and countering. They simply had more to give at the end than we did. We walked away from that race knowing that we did absolutely everything correctly, and it was just not enough to break through that crew. We wanted to win, of course, but it was far better to go down swinging than lose by a lot and feel that we were completely outclassed.”

On finals Sunday, a powerful Molesey crew took down N.S.R. Oslo by two-and-one-third boat lengths to win the Thames Cup. According to a British rowing blog, Molesey included two junior international rowers and a cox who is a member of the Great Britain Squad.

The University Barge oarsmen didn’t stick around for much sightseeing; most, like Seymour, flew home the day after their final race and were back at work on Tuesday. For some time, Seymour has worked for a Philadelphia firm called Urban Engineers. His current assignment has him performing daily on-site safety inspections during the construction of the new 60-storey Comcast Innovation and Technology Center. His firm reports independently to the City of Philadelphia.

Will he be back in England next summer to compete on the Thames? In addition to the actual caliber of the racing at Henley and the permeating sense of history at the event, the various formal, ritualized social functions help make the regatta absolutely unique, and Seymour feels he speaks for most of his boat mates when he says he still hasn’t had his fill.

He explained, “For me, it would be hard to turn down another chance to race at Henley, especially if we return many of the same guys from this year’s boat. It’s a special experience, and there’s a great deal of positive energy that develops around the whole enterprise.”

sports