UVA Rowing Eager to Build on Solid Foundation

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The Thomas Temple Allan Boathouse sits on the west bank of the Rivanna Reservoir, and inside the facility hang banners commemorating the proud history of the University of Virginia rowing program.

Under head coach Kevin Sauer, who retired last year, the Cavaliers won 22 ACC championships and recorded 17 top-five finishes at NCAA regattas, with team titles in 2010 and 2012. But UVA has finished better than ninth at NCAAs only twice in the past eight years, a decline of which the program’s current members are well aware.

“It’s a huge motivation for me and the team to get Virginia back in the top five and just keep going,” rising junior Lila Henn said.

There were encouraging signs this season, the Wahoos’ first under Wesley Ng, Sauer’s successor. Coming off an uneven regular season, Virginia exceeded expectations at the ACC regatta, finishing second behind eventual NCAA champion Stanford. Then last weekend in West Windsor, N.J., the Hoos finished 10^th at NCAAs after losing a tiebreaker for ninth with another ACC team, Cal. Virginia placed 13^th at the NCAA Championships in 2024.

“We definitely are proud of the improvement,” Ng said. “Finishing top 10 in the country is really hard, and we’ve already seen a big uptick in both recruiting activity and transfer portal [interest].”

Three UVA boats competed at Mercer Lake last weekend. In the marquee race, the Varsity Eight, the Hoos finished 11^th. They were sixth in the Second Varsity Eight and 14^th in the Varsity Four.

In qualifying heats for each of those races, the top six boats move on to grand finals, where most of the team points can be won. His program’s ultimate objective is to win the NCAA title, Ng noted, but “there are intermediate goals to get there. We need to break into the top six first. You can’t race for the national championship without putting all three crews in the grand final. We got one of three, and our Varsity Eight was two seconds out of doing that in the semifinal. So you can sink your teeth into the idea that, hey, we need to be two seconds faster.”

Henn, who’s from Palo Alto, Calif., rowed on the Second Varsity Eight. The Cavaliers’ other returning rowers include Elsa Hartman, a member of the Varsity Eight who’s from Roseville, Calif., near Sacramento.

The Cavaliers’ postseason improvement helped them break “through some false ceilings we might have put up for ourselves in terms of what we’re capable of, particularly our results in our heats [at NCAAs],” said Hartman, a rising senior. “I think both the Varsity and the Second Varsity had some really strong finishes in those races, and we’re all just really excited to see how that builds to the fall.”

With the change in coaching staffs after last season, there was “a little bit of an adjustment to get used to their new plans and the way they build training,” Hartman said. “And so I think we’re all really excited, because we know what to expect, we’re ready, and we have the data in front of us to see how fast we can be.”

Ng said he wanted his crews to love “feeling of the boat going fast and everything building off of that. That’s why you train more, that’s why you do the recovery modalities, that’s why you treat your teammates better: so that you could all enjoy being in a fast boat more often.

“And I feel like we did that. I feel like we got the boats rowing really technically well, where every practice the boat felt like it was advancing and getting better. So that was that was the primary goal for the year: Let’s make rowing the priority, because it’s so highly technical. The results on the water I think also played that out. It was an improvement for each of the athletes, no matter where they started. And now that gives us the foundation to start really ramping up the physical-effort side and the training volume potentially changing a little bit, all those things that are going to give us the proof of how much faster we can go and how much faster we need to go.”

Under Sauer, Henn said, the Cavaliers “were very focused on overall volume of training, which definitely has its merits. But I think this year was a lot of quality over quantity. We really focused on the small details of the rowing stroke. We spent so much time on little details and analyzing data that we really wouldn’t do last year but which I think has brought us a lot of speed.”

Hartman agreed. “Wes really prioritizes the data and he gets very analytical with the technique of rowing,” she said. “And so I think it’s been a really great blend, honestly, going into this year, because I think what Kevin really prioritized was the heart of the athletes, and sort of that grit and drive, determination, sort of old-school aspect, which I think has a lot of benefits to the team. So I think the returning rowers who had that spirit that came from Kevin, combined with the new data and the analytical side of Wes, built a really strong team, and I’m hoping the returners can really bring that moving forward into new year as well.”

Ng came to UVA last June after eight seasons as head coach at the University of Pennsylvania. Under Ng’s leadership, Penn made the first three appearances at NCAAs in school history, finishing 11^th in 2022, sixth in 2023 and 10^th in 2024.

His assistants at UVA include Helen Samaniego, whose maiden name is Tompkins. As a senior in 2010, she rowed on the Varsity Eight and helped the Hoos secure the program’s first NCAA team title. Ng’s other assistant coaches are Josie Konopka and Taylor Ruden, and former UVA rower Kate Kelly is a graduate assistant.

With a new staff, Henn said, “there’s going to be a little bit of an adjustment. It kind of makes everyone a first-year again, learning a new training plan and adjusting to new people. But I think we really, really hit our stride [late in the season]. And I think for all the returning rowers, experiencing that and figuring out what works, it’ll set us up really well for next season to keep that momentum and productivity going right at the start.”

Of the 20 women who rowed on UVA’s three boats at the NCAA regatta, 10 will be back next season, Ng said, including Kennedy Housley, a leader on the Varsity Eight.

“So the nucleus will be there,” Ng said, “but we will need obviously first-years and people that were injured and didn’t compete and transfers. We’re expecting that there’s going to be an influx [of rowers] coming in that we’re going to need.”

Ng is high on the rowers who have already committed to UVA for 2025-26, and he’s looking for several more in the transfer portal. “They’ve now seen what is possible here,” he said, “and I think that’s what could really throw some accelerant on this thing.”

At the ACC and NCAA regattas, Ng said, his rowers saw that “we can compete with these top programs, and we can produce the elite speed. We just need to figure out a way to do it for longer and do it more reliably and sustainably. I think they see that it is within reach. And that also means finding the right people that want to run at that challenge. It’s very clear that we have the bare bones and the infrastructure to do this thing. Now we just need to sprint at it.”

The ACC added three schools last year, all of which have rowing programs. SMU has yet to become a power in the sport, but Cal has captured four NCAA titles and Stanford has won three, including two in the past three seasons.

“Stanford and Cal being added to the ACC definitely ups the competition,” Hartman said, “so it’s going to make it a lot harder [for UVA to reach] those goals. But at the same time I think it’s going to push our team and our conference in the right direction, because if we can get competitive with a team like Stanford, we can be competitive with anyone. So I think for our team, looking at it from that perspective is going to open a lot of doors for us. The closer we can get to them, the closer we’re going to get to having our team being in that podium spot at NCAAs.”

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