The Bromfield Acton-Boxborough rowing team made a strong showing in the Northeast Fall Championship Regatta held Sunday, Oct. 12, on Worcester’s Lake Quinsigamond.
The girls second and third varsity 4s and second and third varsity 8s, and the boys novice 8, all won their events. The girls first varsity 8 and novice 4 snapped up silver. The girls double finished third for bronze, and three more BA-B varsity and one novice crew just missed the proverbial podium with fourth-place finishes. “We were successful this weekend because everyone shows up every day with 110 percent, just ready to go,” said Acton-Boxborough senior Ava Dawn, a girls team captain. “It’s that determination that everyone has on the team that wins medals.”
Competition hosts Regatta Point Rowing compressed the schedule twice before the early morning start to avoid an oncoming nor’easter and then once more when racing was underway, causing BA-B to withdraw from one event because there would no longer be time for rowers to hop from one boat into another. Every athlete did compete in at least one race on the 4,200-meter course. It never poured, but headwinds bedeviled the boats. “Rowing is all about adaptability,” Dawn said. “It’s windy on Bare Hill Pond, and we’re used to it by now. That definitely helped us.”
The varsity boys, who had finished up racing early in the day, stayed through the last girls 8s races to cheer and help hoist the big boats up on the top rack of the trailer. “From the get-go, I was so proud of how the team worked together—especially off the water. It didn’t matter whether it was a novice boat or a girls boat, we were just there to help the team,” said A-B senior Patrick Tucker, a captain of the boys squad.
In this regatta, BA-B races as “juniors” due to the team’s dual-school composition. Single-school teams race as “high school.” In total, 42 teams and clubs from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and New York entered 293 boats. Christopher Clark, who graduated from Bromfield in 2020, won gold in the master’s single.
Some BA-B varsity athletes rowed in their novice racing shirts because the team’s order of blue and white unisuits, purchased from a Canadian manufacturer, was caught up in a U.S. Customs tar pit of changing tariffs and the government shutdown. The day before the regatta, Lindsay Rosenman, the team’s volunteer clothing coordinator, saw that the shipment had arrived at the UPS hub in Chelmsford, so she drove there with her rower, A-B sophomore Ben Rosenman. “It was a fail,” Lindsay said. That facility is “not set up for package pickups, but we had an interesting tour of the grounds while looking for someone to talk to.”
The BA-B girls have three berths—two spots from crews requalifying in last year’s contest, and one from the annual lottery—in the world-famous Head of the Charles Regatta Oct. 17 through 19. The boys did not requalify any boats in 2024, nor did they luck out in the lottery. Holly Hatton contacted the race committee to see if one of her girls’ berths could be reassigned to the BA-B boys, but the committee refused. The unisuits arrived on Monday, the day after Northeast Championships, so spectators on the Charles will have no problem spotting the blue and white BA-B swooshes at the world’s largest regatta.
Jill Maxwell is a BA-B parent and auntie.
Northeast Fall Championship Regatta, Oct. 12
Varsity boys
- 2x: Mihir Vidhate and Maxton Zilinek; fifth place, 22 minutes, 25.1 seconds
- 1V 4+: Patrick Tucker, Ben Rosenman, Teddy Stoddard, Oscar Maxwell, and coxswain Noah Kim; fourth, 16:22.2
- 2V 4+: Eric Bilal, Liam Abayasinghe, Aidan Abayasinghe, and coxswain Mason Wade; fourth, 18:36.6
Varsity girls
- 2x: Sophia Pierce and Ellie Pulido; third, 21:48.1
- 1V 4+: Isabel Walker, Caroline Yang, Abigail Hirschberg, Alicia Tang, and coxswain Gwyneth Poutasse; seventh, 19:39.3
- 2V 4+: Amelia McCormick, Simone Taylor, Ellery Thomas, Beth Belanger, and coxswain Yuvika Rao; first, 19:40.9
- 3V 4+: Bronwyn Lemke, Lily Lem Moustakas, Sophia Lopez, Gabriella Kim, and coxswain Hanna Lem Moustakas; first, 20:40.7
- 1V 8+: Isabel Walker, Abigail Hirschberg, Annabelle Purcell, Caroline Yang, Ava Dawn, Eleanor Daly, Braeden Hartley, Emily Yang, and coxswain Hanna Lem Moustakas; second, 17:24.3
- 2V 8+: Maroon Kendrick, Gabriella Kim, Piper Candon, Etta Maxwell, Amelia McCormick, Simone Taylor, Ellery Thomas, Beth Belanger, and coxswain Yuvika Rao; first, 18:46.1
- 3V 8+: Gabriella Shee, Sravya Hamsala, Sophia Pierce, Ainsley Charland, Nix Klein, Reval Argow-Sniderman, Autumn Desclos, Alicia Tang; first, 18:58.0
