UVA Rower Following Family Tradition

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — In July 1996, in Gainesville, Ga., the former Kate Slatter made history. On Lake Lanier, she became the first Australian woman to win an Olympic gold medal in rowing.

Thirty years later, on the same body of water, her daughter Georgia Allen will row for the University of Virginia at this weekend’s NCAA Championships. Katie Allen will be there to cheer Georgia on.

“That’s the really cool part,” UVA head coach Wesley Ng said.

Kate Allen, a three-time Olympian, won a silver medal at the 2000 Games in Sydney, Australia. It’s too early to know how high Georgia will ascend in the sport, but she’s already distinguished herself at UVA.

Allen, who rows on the Cavaliers’ Second Varsity Eight boat, was named ACC Newcomer of the Year this month, “and I think she’s just touching her potential,” Ng said.

Asked if she was named for the state in which her mom earned Olympic gold, Allen smiled and shook her head. That’s just a coincidence, she’s been told.

“I'm named after my great-grandpa, George Howard,” Allen said. “He was a really impressive guy and was running marathons till he was in his late 90s.”

Allen, who enrolled at UVA last summer, was born in Sydney, but she moved with her family to England when she was a young girl.

Hers is an athletic family—her father, who’s English, is an ultramarathoner who rowed at the University of Oxford—and Allen took part in multiple sports when she was growing up in the London area. At first, rowing was not one of them.

“I actually was told not to row by my parents,” recalled Allen, who has dual citizenship. “They just said it was really painful and really hard. I also wasn't allowed to row until I was older, because my mom had seen women she'd rowed with get injuries.

“Originally, I wasn't supposed to row until I was 18, but I got to row when I was 16, because I kind of fell out of love with the sport I was doing at the time. I was doing track, and the club I was training at was just too far away and I couldn't make it work. I needed a sport in the interim, and there was a rowing club down the road. So my dad took me to the beginners’ session in 2022.”

Allen joined the Tideway Scullers School, a club that trains on the River Thames, and rowing became her athletic focus.

“What made me stick with it was the people,” she said. “I’ve my best friends through the sport, and I think I thrive in a routine. So just having that, I think, allows me to be successful in other areas, the structure of having a sport like that. And I'm very competitive, too. I like to win.”

Ng, who left the University of Pennsylvania after the 2023-24 academic year to become head coach at Virginia. Allen would end being one of the first recruits Ng landed at UVA, but she was more interested in other schools initially after deciding she wanted to attend college in the United States.

“I had an official visit list of three universities, and Virginia wasn't on it to start off with,” Allen said.

Her top three were Washington, Syracuse and Yale, and she wasn’t interested in UVA. As chance would have it, though, her mother went to Italy to the speak to rowers from Australia who were training for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

At the camp, Kate Allen met Samy Morton, whom Ng had coached at Penn, "and she was just raving to my mum about Wes,’ ” Georgia recalled. “She said, ‘You've got to go see this guy. He's an amazing coach. You've got to get your daughter to check him out.’ ”

When she and Ng finally spoke, Georgia said, they connected immediately. “I got on a call with him, and we didn't speak about recruiting the whole time,” she said. “We just spoke about rowing and the technical side behind it, and I was just so intrigued by that conversation.”

Other coaches with whom she spoke concentrated on trying to sell Allen on their schools and programs. Ng took another approach.

“Wes was just talking to me about rowing, and it just so interesting,” Allen said, “talking about how much of the watts that you produce on land machines can go onto the water ...  I just thought it was the coolest thing ever, and we spoke for an hour about that side of rowing.”

Allen, a graduate of Christ’s School in Richmond, England, took an official visit to UVA in September 2024. She committed to the Cavaliers a couple of weeks later. She took a gap year in 2024-25 and moved back to Australia, where she trained with the Sydney Rowing Club.

When Allen, who has applied to the McIntire School of Commerce, arrived on Grounds last summer, she joined a program that has won two NCAA team titles, in 2010 and 2012. The Hoos haven’t been NCAA championship contenders in recent years, but Allen said she liked “the idea of being part of a program that was building towards something. I could have joined a program that was already up there, but it just seemed really exciting, and Wes has this different approach to coaching.

“I don't think there's any other program in the U.S. right now which is doing what Wes is doing, with the way that he's approaching it from a different viewpoint. It’s a combination of a lot of things. It's the communication with the athletes, it's taking everything into account, trying new things out. The technical side, too. We don't just go out and row for miles. We go out and we drill, and we drill well, too. And we row less, but we do more with that distance.”

𝗡𝗖𝗔𝗔 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗦𝗲𝗲𝗱𝘀 ⤵️ 🔶⚔️🔷 #GoHoos pic.twitter.com/8MKothk3Rd

— Virginia Rowing (@UVARowing) May 19, 2026

In 2024-25, their first season under Ng, the Cavaliers placed 10^th at the NCAA regatta. UVA finished 11^th in the Varsity Eight, sixth in the Second Varsity Eight, and 14^th in the Varsity Eight.

On Lake Lanier, where the Hoos trained early this year, they’re seeded sixth in the Varsity Eight, third in the Second Varsity Eight, and sixth in the Varsity Four.

“There's a lot of excitement,” Allen said. “It's a really full-circle moment, because Wes has been speaking about this since day one. We had these things called Super Saturdays off the bat, which was a lot of work at the end of the week building into a hard Saturday morning practice. From the get-go he'd talk about the heats of ACCs and the heats of NCAAs and having to do three really difficult pieces in a row, three days in a row or two in one day.

“The team's believed this whole time, and we've gotten to see that progress, so I think we're just really excited to go out there and give it a run down the track and see how far we can get.”

Virginia is coming off a strong showing at the ACC Championships in Raleigh, N.C. Seeded to finish third, the Cavaliers left Lake Wheeler as ACC runners-up, behind Stanford.

Allen wasn't the only Cavalier honored by the ACC. Elsa Hartman, Flynn Greene and Paula Lutz  were named to the All-ACC first team, and coxswain Brie Joe repeated as a second-team selection.

Asked about his program’s improvement, Ng said, “I think our vocabulary around rowing is more consistent. The adjustment period, we got through it in a good way. I underestimated how hard it was going to be for people to adjust to me, and also how much I needed to learn and adjust to them. So I feel like I've helped maximize what they're capable of doing better.”

Now comes the NCAA regatta in Gainesville, where Allen, like her mom did at the 1996 Olympics, will try to make some memories on Lake Lanier.

“I’m really, really excited to go out there and lay it down and see what we can make happen,” Allen said.

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