A Bainbridge Island Rowing team, consisting of two juniors and two seniors, placed 18th in the 2o25 U.S. Rowing Youth National Championships June 12-15.

The girls in the boat were Dolly Courtway, Paige Murphy, Alita Kakutani and Addie Carleton. The team previously competed in the Pacific Northwest Regional Championships, placing first out of 30 teams from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.

“Racing at nationals is one of those things that’s kind of like our unicorn event,” Courtway said. “Like, every single year it’s kind of like, ‘oh, we’re going to wrap it up with regionals,’ which is our final regatta, and there’s five or six regions in the country, and so everybody goes to their own regionals, and it’s kind of…the ending mark of the year.”

Several BIR crews reached the finals at regionals, earning top-five finishes in multiple events. The U19 Women’s 4x team (consisting of Courtway, Murphy, Kakutani, and Carleton) took first place in their sculling event, earning them a spot at nationals.

At nationals in Sarasota, FL., the crew raced in the finals against some competitive crews from across the country. There were crews of varying sizes, some having hundreds of kids on their teams, while BI had 23 girls on their team. In totality, there were over 4,000 athletes competing in nationals.

Over the course of the season, BI spent a lot of their time exchanging lineups and getting accustomed to growing with different people on the team. Chelsea Vessenes, the girls’ varsity coach, said the crew trained throughout the fall, winter, and spring, spending a large amount of time on the water and getting used to rowing with different people.

The races BI competes in are 2,000 meters in length, so it requires a lot of technical skills from the girls in the boat, such as being able to “finesse with the blade,” as well as fitness and power. Courtway said her team can traverse the 2,000 meters in seven minutes, but the feat is “brutally hard and intense” and requires a lot of technique and working together.

“We have a lot of really experienced competitors and experienced racers who’ve been [together] for several, you know, three or four or five years,” Vessenes said. “They knew how to be super effective over water and in the boats.”

Amanda Pekasky, the leader of the BIR organization, noted that the commitment the girls showed at the championships was a reflection of their passion and overall commitment to pursuing excellence at the highest level.

Vessenes noted that before regionals, the team made a transition to sweeping instead of sculling. In rowing, sweeping means that the athletes hold one oar with both hands, whereas in sculling, athletes have two oars, one in each hand.

The transition made the team unsure of how their first race would go in regionals and later on in nationals as well, but after the first race in regionals, the team found they were “pretty good” at sculling after they won their time trial and the final race afterwards.

Vessenes noted there was a lot of pressure and tension leading up to nationals as a result.

“I would say it’s hard not to feel a little bit stressed…(about) what you’re going to do, and there’s no way of knowing.”