Big finish for Norcal, Serra crews

Despite lack of experience, they both enjoyed a tremendous amount of success this season.

It culminated last week in the US Rowing national championship regatta in Sarasota, Florida. Norcal qualified six teams for the national championships — three male and three female teams. It was an opportunity to prove they are among the best in the country and they did just that, winning the Mens’ U15 4x+ and Mens’ U16 8+ national titles.

“We had great results,” said Norcal Crew director Beth Anderson, who left the Oakland Strokes club to take over Norcal in 2019. “We wanted to come (to nationals) and do really well. The expectation was to go and win a national title.

“These teams (we were competing against) were fast.”

The 4x+ featured four rowers and a coxswain, who serves as kind of the director for the boat. Led by Yoonsa Park, the rowers of Liam Bai, Tilak Thiyagarajan, and Skylar and William Wood, and combined to complete the 2,000-meter race in a time of 7:17.406, beating second place Vashon Island-Washington by nearly a second. The Washington team finished in a time of 7:18.689.

Norcal was tied for the race lead at the 500-meter mark, as both it and Long Beach Junior covered the distance in a time of 1:45.9. From there, Norcal pulled ahead and stayed there. Vashon Island moved up into second place at the 1000-meter mark, trailing by six-tenths of a second. Norcal maintained its lead for the final 1,000 meters to claim the title.

The U16 boat — coxed by Adalti Avi, and comprised of Matias Bliss-Corrascosa, Nicholas Brown, Tristan Carpenter, Huck Jagerson, Jonah Le, Jack Madwed, Kade McKenzie and Nigel Root — led almost the entire way. They were about a half-second faster than the second-place boat, Marin, at the 500-meter checkpoint and steadily pulled away the rest of the race. The Norcal boat pushed its advantage to eight-tenths of a second at the 1,000-meter mark and held a two-second lead three-quarters of the way through the race to capture the national championship.

“Marin is one of the best clubs in the nation,” Anderson said.

Anderson said the focus this year was on the younger age groups, to build them to the point they are annual contenders for regional and national titles over the next couple of years.

“Part of our goal is to build up our bottom end. … We put a lot emphasis on the younger kids this year,” Anderson said. “[Norcal Crew] is the biggest program in the South Bay. Norcal has never really been that fast, but we’re changing that. When I coached at Oakland, we went from being called the Oakland “Jokes” to winning national titles.

“Let’s make [Norcal] fast. … We’re just trying to build the program into something that is consistently competitive. The goal is to always be in the mix.”

Serra sent just two rowers to the national regatta, sophomores Alex Kaiser and Adrian Panezic. While the Padres’ pair finished 17th in qualifying, they improved their time and positioning in the “C” final, finishing second, which was good for 14th overall.

“They were certainly disappointed,” said Serra head coach Mike Verdone. “It’s an unfortunate reality check. There are some big boys out there.”

Both the Norcal and Serra boats qualified out of the Southwest Regional regatta the first weekend of May. The top four from each event at the regional qualified for the national regatta.

“It’s huge,” Verdone said. “It’s the fastest (regional) in the nation.”

Verdone, however, was just happy to see a Serra boat and Padres colors represented at nationals. Considering the Serra club was gutted by the pandemic, Verdone is already seeing a turnaround.

Unlike Norcal Crew, which is a club anyone can join, the Serra club team is limited to just Serra students, meaning campus recruiting is vital to the team’s success.

“In 2018, we had around 71 athletes,” Verdone said, a 2006 Serra graduate who took over the program in 2017. “Through some coaching shifts and leading into COVID and not being able to recruit on campus, it just hit numbers hard.

“Norcal has, like, 200-plus athletes. We have, like, 30.”

Because of the small numbers, Verdone had to be strategic when it came to filling boats. He found his best rowers and put them together and then worked on having success while fielding a smaller number of boats.

That didn’t stop the Padres from enjoying some success on the water. The Padres’ freshmen 8s boat, along with Kaiser and Panezic in the two-man shell, qualified for the scholastic national regatta in Camden, New Jersey during the Memorial Day weekend. While the 8s team failed to make the finals, Kaiser and Panezic qualified for the boys’ JV 2x final, finishing in fourth place.

Verdone believes Kaiser and Panezic could have had more success with more time together in the boat. The two worked together for only a few weeks and in that time managed to qualify for the scholastic and club national championships.

“Ultimately, their downfall was time in the boat,” Verdone said. “They had, like, three weeks together.”

With the season completed, Verdone is now focused on filling out the team, while also trying to get this season’s athletes to the next level.

“We had a pretty aggressive freshman class. … We never take freshmen on road trips, but this year we did because they did so well,” Verdone said. “The team is stoked on what happened this year.”