Club claims seven gold medals at Canadian Henley
By Bob Nuse, Sports Editor
The Princeton National Rowing Association-Mercer made quite an impression at the season-ending Royal Canadian Henley Regatta earlier this month in Saint Catharines, Ontario.
The Mercer Junior Rowing Club came away with five medals at the event, and the club added two more gold medals at the Masters level.
”We were really happy,” said MJRC girls coach Ted Sobolewski. “We thought we had a chance to win a couple of the events. I wasn’t sure we could do as well as we did. It was pretty exciting. At Henley you only medal if you win. It is a big event. There were maybe close to 70 Junior 4s there so there were a lot of heats.
”There was a lot of work that went into it for the whole program. We felt like we had a pretty good year last year — we had a crew that was third at youth nationals. Everyone came back ready to get to work. At the level we are training at we ask a lot of the athletes. It is pretty much straight on from the fall through now. The results we had were the culmination of a lot of hard work over the whole year.”
Mercer won gold in the under-19 women’s four plus coxswain and won gold in four more events. The U19 women’s four plus coxswain crew included senior Rena White (Princeton), senior Alex Natale (Basking Ridge and The Hun School), senior Badia Shehab (Hopewell), junior Kate Hickey (Yardley, and coxswain Kate Edmondson (Westfield).
”I have been to Henley quite often since I am from Buffalo,” said Sobolewski, who has competed in the regatta as a high school and college rower as well as a coach. “I have been going there since 2000 and I have come in second a lot but this is the first time winning.”
Finally medaling was important not just to Sobolewski, but to the team as well.
”Ever since last year, when we took second in two events and third in one event, we wanted to come back this year and get Coach Ted his first medal,” said girls’ team co-captain Rena White. “It definitely motivated us.”
The PNRA-Mercer girls also won gold in the Under-19 women’s eight plus coxswain event. The final for this event featured a dramatic re-match of June’s national championship race in which Oakland Strokes nabbed the national championship and PNRA-Mercer finished fifth.
”We trained really hard this summer so we were able to get ourselves in position to break Oakland Strokes in the race,” White said. “Nationals was the peak for them. It was the fastest boat they have had in a while. It’s hard to maintain that speed. The difference was that we were able to gain speed over the summer. We also made some changes to our lineup.”
The U19 women’s eight plus coxswain crew featured White, Natale, Hickey, co-captain senior Hayley Bork (Robbinsville), Shehab, senior Kelly Fischer (Hopewell), junior Caitlin Cleary (Princeton), graduate Geena Fram (Lawrenceville) and coxswain senior Katarina Stough (Princeton). All of the girls will return to row with PNRA-Mercer in the fall except Fram, who will row for Brown University.
”We feel like we have a lot of depth in our program,” Sobolewski said. “Only one of the girls in the eight won’t be back next year. We feel like the sky is the limit for them. We won the Under-19 and the Under-17 so we showed solid depth. There was a lot of good competition in those events. The kids have worked really hard and that gets a culture going. I think that culture has really started to take hold and we’re seeing the success as a result.”
The girls showed their depth and promise by winning gold medals in the two main events for rowers under 17. The U17 women’s eight plus coxswain crew included sophomore Laila Shehab and junior Catherine Porter (both from Hopewell), Cleary, freshman Sara Hansen and junior Elise Gorberg (both from West Windsor), sophomore Katie Lustig (Newtown), sophomore Lauren Miller (Hamilton), junior Rachel Mumau (Millstone Township), and coxswain junior Sydney Holgado (Robbinsville).
The U17 women’s four plus coxswain crew included Cleary, Porter, Shehab, Hansen, and Holgado. The U17 coxed four event featured a photo finish in which Mercer edged out the Victoria City Rowing Club by two hundredths of a second.
The Mercer girls lightweight pair of White and Hickey won gold in the under age 23 category, beating second place University of British Columbia by nearly eight seconds. The girls are in high school but were eager to compete in the only lightweight pair event for juniors on the Henley schedule.
For the second consecutive year, PNRA-Mercer boys placed second in the highly competitive Under-19 men’s 8-plus coxswain event. The crew includes co-captain coxswain senior Matt Perez (Robbinsville), co-captain senior Elias Abilheira and senior Aaron Goodman (both from Princeton), junior Kevin Borup (Monmouth Junction), senior Dylan Adams (Avon by the Sea), senior Alexander Hedge (Morristown), senior Dan Gleim (West Windsor), senior Alexander Blackwood (Chatham), and graduate Tom Walker (Princeton). Walker will row for the University of Wisconsin in the fall. The crew is coached by former PNRA-Mercer rower Jim Newcombe.
Finally, the PNRA-Mercer Masters won two gold medals, demonstrating that rowing is a sport for all ages. The gold-medal winning women’s master D eight crew featured Kristen Appelget, Judy Gorberg, Susan Voorhees, Cassandra Cohen, Cheryl Baldino, Ellen Torney, Christina Tang, Kathy Kalinowski, and coxswain Sheila Riley. Riley, a graduate of Stuart Country Day School, is a coxswain for the College of Holy Cross.
The other PNRA-Mercer Masters medal was won by the women’s master E four with coxswain crew of Cheryl Baldino, Ellen Torney, Sharon Waters, Kathy Kalinowski, and coxswain Sheila Riley.
”Our goal was to come away with one medal and we wound up with two,” Sobolewski said. “It was a great showing. We’re a program that anyone can join and be competitive. It was very exciting to see them do so well.”