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QuickTake:
After several weeks of twice-a-day practices on the waters of Dexter Lake leading up to the nationals in Florida, the boys U17 coxed four capped their season with a "display of dominance," their coach said.
Despite lightning delays and hot, humid weather, a crew from Eugene Rowing Club won a USRowing youth national championship June 14 in Sarasota, Florida, the club’s first such victory since 2022 and only the second national championship in the club’s known history.
The under-17 boys’ “coxed four,” which is a boat with four rowers and a coxswain who steers, went undefeated over the weekend and won the championship race by 3 seconds.
“It was pretty much a display of dominance,” said Josh Baker, the team’s head coach. “We ultimately just settled on going out strong and pushing early and making it a race for everybody else for second place, and that’s exactly what they did.”
The boat was coxswained by SaraFrances Gill, with rowers Wesley Warren, Colin Parish, Owen Niell and Wyatt Kotar. Parish and Niell are 16 years old; the others are 15.
“Our kids work so hard,” Baker said. “We practice six days a week. They do additional workouts on their own. … It was definitely a result of just all of that hard work paying off.”
Parish, a sophomore at South Eugene High School, agrees. For nearly four weeks, the U17 boys practiced twice a day, once at 5:30 a.m. before school at Dexter Lake and once after school at their local rowing gym.
“I just love being on the water and love the sport so much,” Parish said. “I mean, this is a step in the right direction, and we hope we can just keep at it, and in the next couple of years, keep winning.”
Other Eugene boats improved their records from prior years at the event.
The club’s boys U19 coxed four team moved up from 14th in 2025 to sixth this year. The Eugene girls U19 youth pair advanced to the A finals, placing seventh among the nation’s top youth rowers for their event, and the U17 girls double also earned first place in the C Final.
“All in all, we had a great showing,” Baker said. “It was hard. It was hot, and there were a lot of lightning delays, but they did a really, really nice job just executing whenever their number was called.”
Three Division 1 recruits are among the high school seniors in the club this year, including Levi Warren and Henry Warren, who have both committed to row for the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Lucy Davis, who will row next year at Oregon State University.
The club will retain all of its U17 girls and U17 boys for the coming year and hopes to introduce more youth to rowing this summer through its learn-to-row camps.
“Over the last couple of years, we’ve continued to put Eugene in a position where everybody is talking about us; nobody wants to race us,” Baker said. “We’re not really hiding underneath the radar anymore.”
