WAHS Rowing Team Is a National Powerhouse

Rowing may be something not everyone following Western Albemarle High School sports thinks about as the practice sessions are held off-campus at Beaver Creek reservoir and the competitions are held out of town and out of state most of the time. Approximately 60 student athletes are participating on the rowing team this season with strong participation by both boys and girls. The remarkable thing about the team is that this local rowing team has been a powerhouse for years, consistently winning medals at the state and national level.

For those unfamiliar with the sport, rowing comes in two basic forms, sweeping and sculling, additionally defined by how many rowers are in the boat. In sweeping, each rower has only one oar and teams are made of two, four or eight rowers. The team may have a coxswain in the boat to steer the boat and coach the rowers. In sculling, each rower controls two oars and teams are made up of a single rower as well as teams of two and four. The WAHS team competes in sculling.

Participating on the local rowing team requires a level of commitment from the athletes that exceeds most of the other high school sports. While the team trains for fall and spring regattas, they train all winter, and the athletes must commit to a three-season training program. The training program has half the athletes training in the morning before school and the other half after school at the Beaver Creek facility. Training sessions are split between on-water training in the boats and on-shore conditioning.

Head Coach Craig Redinger has led the team for the last 10 years. He not only coaches Western students, but also has a limited number of eighth grade students as well as some high school students from Staunton, Saint Anne’s, Richmond and other schools who train with the team. In the fall, the team races as Beaver Creek Sculling. In the spring, the team races as the Warriors, with only Western students rowing. 

Coach Redinger is proud of the fact that at least a couple of dozen athletes on the team have gone on to race in college. Rowing is one of the sports in which colleges regularly offer scholarships to women, several of which from Western have received. One standout Western graduate, Lucas Farmer, is rowing for the University of Wisconsin and has been selected to row on the USRowing under-23 team.

The Warriors have been on the podium consistently. Last year the team won the state championship with four gold, three silver and one bronze medal. The team also took a silver and bronze medal at the Scholastic Rowing Association of America national races in Tennessee and at the Stotesbury Cup Regatta in Philadelphia. The team will have two boats in the Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston on October 18-20, in Boston, one of the most prestigious and largest rowing regattas of the year that draws 11,000 rowers and 400,000 spectators. 

Based on their performance last season, the sculling team of Thomas Lambert and Walter Donovan were guaranteed an invitation to this year’s race. In addition, Western also had a girls quad sculling team accepted as an entry into the race. Go Warriors!