Vesper rowers train for U-23 world championships

Colleen Wohlrab was immersed in her morning workout on the Schuylkill when a woman rowed up next to her.

The woman wanted to know: Was she from Vesper Boat Club? Was she going to the Under-23 World Championships in Austria? Wohlrab told her that she was.

There were more in training, actually, a small flotilla of them on the river. For the summer, the Schuylkill has become the de facto national team training center for the under-23 lightweight women's class.

At the U.S. trials in June, Vesper swept all three races - four, double, and single - to qualify seven athletes for the Under-23 World Championships, which begin Wednesday in Linz.

There is no national team at the under-23 level for the class, coach Scott Wisniewski said as he drove the launch at a practice in early July, "so we've kind of taken on the role, at least at the under-23 level, of being the women's lightweight national team."

Three of the athletes, Kayla McNeill, Nikki Bourassa, and Jamie Roloff, are from Pennsylvania or New Jersey. Jenna Hebert attends Penn and Alex Morss is at Princeton. The remaining rowers, Wohlrab and Emalia Seto, go to school at Tulsa and were drawn to Vesper by its unequaled record in the class and by Philadelphia's rich rowing history.

Nathan Smith and Ryan Kelliher also qualified in the men's pair event to make nine rowers for Vesper.

The day's practice was low-intensity. The rowers picked at their fingers or twirled strands of hair during lulls. They breathed easily. Wisniewski said they would push about 70 pounds of force just with their legs each stroke for the 70-minute workout. There were about 1,200 strokes.

They practice two or three times daily, and spend their downtime fund-raising for the trip. The team estimates it will need to raise $45,000 by July 21.

The Vesper program for the class was started just five years ago, but it has become one of the premier summer training spots for under-23 lightweight women from around the country. Seto, for example, is from California but was persuaded by her Tulsa teammates to come to Vesper.

Vesper has a storied history in other classes. Its old, dim rooms are lined with plaques and trophies, some more than a century old. It made sense to expand into the lightweight women's class. The class has a boat in the Olympics, but there are few options for college-age rowers.

Philadelphia has provided a good fit.

"There's such a rich rowing culture here," Hebert said. "Some people on the streets here actually know what rowing is, and you definitely don't find that everywhere."

Local contingent. Also competing in Austria will be Penn A.C.'s lightweight men's quad of Michael Davidson, Mark Tubergen, Michael Slopsema, and Charles Anderson, with coxswain John Gould. Unaffiliated rower Jordan Tewksbury Volpe, a 19-year-old from Newtown, Bucks County, qualified to compete in the lightweight pair class.