SUFFERN, WHICH SENT TWO BOATS TO NATIONALS, WON HUDSON VALLEY LEAGUE MEDALS SATURDAY DESPITE LOSING ONE BOAT TO A CRASH.

Nancy Haggerty , nhaggerty@lohud.com

POUGHKEEPSIE – At 6 Saturday morning, the canopies bearing team names were up, food and drink were set out and, as a steady stream of cars continued into the Marist College boathouse parking lot, fans readied for hours of racing on the Hudson.

The event was the Hudson Valley Rowing League Championship, involving high school teams from Section 1 and Section 9. One team was Suffern High School.

Suffern has had a memorable year. The program, founded in 2009, qualified and sent two boats to Nationals, the boys lightweight 4 (150 pounds per rower or less) and varsity boys 8.

Saturday was the 2016 racing season’s finale – a last hurrah to not only the season but to seniors’ high school racing careers.

Later in the day, those kids – 12 girls and seven boys – would sign their names next to those of other former Suffern rowers on a wall inside a small team trailer.

“They sign the trailer so they’ll always be part of Suffern crew. They can always come back and see themselves," said parent Chuck Lockyer, who created the wall and whose son Danny followed Lockyer’s since-graduated son, Dylan, into crew.

(Photo: Nancy Haggerty/Journal News)

 

 

There’s no parent wall to sign but maybe there should be. Lockyer hung out under the Suffern canopy with Steve DeBoer, who was on hand to cheer, although his son, Chip, has graduated.

Comparing crew to other sports, DeBoer said, “Because it’s co-ed, there’s a better sense of teamwork and cooperation. They’re side by side. It’s just an incredible sport. There’s no one on this team who you’d wish wasn’t there. It’s just a joy coming here.”

Not many sports require as much production as rowing, in which larger trailers haul long, narrow racing boats.

Suffern began its program with a $75,000 grant secured by the now-late state Senator Thomas Morahan. That paid for three boats. Pork barrel money, for sure, but no one dressed in blue and white along the Hudson’s banks was looking back and squawking about that $75,000 being government waste.

Since that time, the district has spent its own money building its small fleet. New boats cost anywhere from $25,000 to $50,000, Suffern coach Craig Jacoby said as he piloted a small safety launch on the river.

Jacoby wasn’t a rower while growing up on Long Island’s south shore. And he wasn’t a rower when drafted by Superintendent of Schools Rob MacNaughton to help coach the new team in 2009.  His first year basically involved traveling with the team and learning from two other coaches, Jeff Friedrichs and assistant Mike Trainor.

Jacoby knew little at first. While attending Springfield College, he’d attended the famed Head of the Charles Regatta. But the lasting impression for him from that had nothing to do with race strategy and everything to do with the event’s tailgate-party atmosphere.

His first love was football. He was a nose tackle for Springfield who went on to coach football at both the college and high school levels.

Wanting to spend more time with his wife and four children, Jacoby, a Suffern special-ed teacher who lives in Monroe, gave up coaching football this year but not rowing, where he has become a level 2 U.S.-certified coach.

(Photo: Nancy Haggerty/Journal News)

 

 

Jacoby is a fan of the sport and a fan of his kids. Rowing isn’t a New York State Public High School Athletic Association sport but it is considered a varsity sport, run under the auspices of the New York State Scholastic Rowing Association.

The NYSPHSAA snub clearly galls Jacoby.

“The kids work as hard every day as any team out there,” he said.

The Suffern program began with modest goals. Expecting 10 kids the first year, it got 25. The next year it had 35. Now it has 33 girls and 33 boys. Those numbers mean many kids won’t race, although Jacoby does his best to get everyone at least some racing time before they graduate.

It’s not an easy sport.

“With every stroke you want to quit. There’s just something that pulls you back,” said senior Chris McNamara, who followed his older brother, Dan, now a Suffern assistant, into rowing.

The commitment is large – fall erging (indoor rowing), weight training three to four days a week beginning in December, with erging picking up in intensity throughout the winter until the season’s start in March.

Kids are tested indoors, rowing 2,000 meters as fast as they can and sometimes as many as 6,000 meters a couple of times a year. (High school races are 1,500 meters.)

Although training on the normally serene Monksville Reservoir in New Jersey, a 20-minute drive from the high school, might seem like a disadvantage since most of Suffern’s races are on rivers, the program has sent kids to varsity or club programs at MIT, UConn, Hamilton, Smith, Drexel, James Madison, Lehigh, Delaware, the University of Tampa and Stevens Tech.

(Photo: Nancy Haggerty/Journal News)

 

 

Team closeness is evident with kids often chanting in unison, "We love it. We love it. We can't get enough of it." But the rowers’ backgrounds are varied.

At Suffern, there are kids who were always athletic, among them senior Kaitlyn McCarren of the girls 8 boat, who comes from an ice hockey-playing family and gave up field hockey and lacrosse to focus on rowing; McNamara of the boys 8, who played volleyball and ran indoor track for Suffern; and senior Justin Aronstein of the boys lightweight 4, who gave up swimming after his freshman year to just row.

But then there are also kids who had no other sport. And there are kids with backgrounds in the arts – kids who participate in band or school musicals.

'‘We’re just one big family,” said Aronstein, who's considering rowing for the University of Florida’s club team. “We all share water, food. We’re all friends and it doesn’t matter what group we’re in.”

“There’s no other feeling like being on a crew team. We’re such a family. And there’s nothing with as much adrenaline as being in a race,” said McCarren, who’s thinking of rowing at SUNY-Geneseo.

“The one thing that unites them is crew,” Jacoby said. “I think it’s cool to see kids so different come together.”

“I coached football for 30 years,” he said. “I thought that was the ultimate team sport. This ranks right up there.”

It might also be the ultimate community sport.

Saturday, as early-morning haze yielded to a sun-filled sky, the Hudson remained unusually calm.

“It’s usually like a sea out here, so this is a glorious day,'' said Vassar College coach Marice Love, who is the Hudson Valley Rowing League president.

“You couldn’t ask for better than this,” Jacoby added, noting currents were so rough last year that instead of racing north to south, boats had to go south to north.

But pristine conditions don’t always prevent problems.

Suffern’s boys lightweight 4 boat, led by four-year coxswain Katie Hock, won its division and would go on to win the Grand Final, which meant that Hock, Danny Lockyer, Harrison Munitz, Aronstein and Matt Dain will see their names etched on the championship cup.

(Photo: Nancy Haggerty/Journal News)

 

 

But a little more than two hours after the race day started and one stroke into its 1,500-meter race, the boys 8 team ran into trouble. The rudder cable snapped in the hands of sophomore coxswain Hannah Diamond.

“We had this crazy face. We looked at each other,” said McNamara, who termed what occurred “insane.”

The boat swung into the path of another boat, from Warwick High, which T-boned Suffern’s bow, cracking it.

“As soon as it started turning toward the other boats I knew it was not going to end well,” Diamond said.

Jacoby, who had just been speaking about loving racers’ no-quit attitudes, got the news on his radio and raced to the scene.

Race officials decided to have another group of boats race and allow Suffern to row back to the boathouse to get another boat to race.

“It’s all hands on deck. They’re doing us a solid here, allowing us to get another boat,” Jacoby said.

Looking at his downcast team, he yelled, “Forget about it. Get your mind right. We’re going to race.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suffern's boys 8 rowing team finished third overall at its final regatta with a borrowed boat after a crash, June 4, 2016. (Video by Nancy Haggerty/Journal News)

Thirty minutes later, at 9:10 a.m., after Jacoby and others had calmed a teary Diamond and retooled foot rests and more in another boat, the team was back on the water with the help of their girls and boys teammates.

“See how everyone was pitching in?” Jacoby said.

Suffern was going to use its girls 8 boat but instead took a loaner from FDR.

“Two coaches offered me boats. Everyone here is really like a family,” Jacoby said.

The boys 8 finished second in its heat and qualified for the Grand Final, where, closest to recreation boats that suddenly appeared on the water, they were slowed by wakes and finished third, using the same FDR boat.

“I’m awfully proud of these guys,” Jacoby said.

Besides the lightweight 4 boys winning its heat and the overall LW 4 title, the boys heavyweight 4 team was third in its division and the girls varsity 4 was third in its division.

(Photo: Nancy haggerty/Journal News)

 

 

Diamond, who got up at 3 a.m. to make it to Poughkeepsie to race, was all smiles afterward.

“I was really upset when it snapped. I kind of felt like there was something more I could do. But finishing second, definitely made up for it,” she said.

The comeback was sweet to share.

“My boat is my family. I call them my eight older brothers,” she said.

“These are the things they’ll remember in 20, 30 years,” Jacoby said: “We crashed a boat and came back and won.”

Twitter: @HaggertyNancy