CAMDEN, N.J. – When the first set of finals in the club national championships start Friday morning on Cooper River, the familiar red, white and black blades of Boston based Community Rowing Inc. will be well represented - again.
Under head coach Ethan Curren, Community Rowing’s junior women’s competitive team has been a fixture in the finals at the USRowing Club Nationals – and the USRowing youth national championships, and the Royal Canadian Henley, not to mention the Head of the Charles Regatta, or the CanAmMex regatta.
In 22-years of coaching kids in Boston, Curren’s crews have won 63 gold medals at club nationals, 14 gold medals at Canadian Henley, 12 medals at the youth national championships and won the Head of the Charles five times.
CRI will take eight crews to the line tomorrow and then start the second round Friday afternoon at the 2013 USRowing Club National Championships, in Camden, N.J. with another group of crews.
Under the new club schedule, the first 37 events will be contested Wednesday to Friday morning with the next 34 events scheduled for Sunday finals. The number of entries in the junior events resulted in the schedule change and the use of time trials to sort the crews out in the heavily subscribed events.
After finals Friday morning, the first 13 events will have time trials Friday afternoon, the rest will be rowed in a heats, semifinal and final format.
What will also be different this weekend is that this will be the last time Curren, and his faded red and white Hawaiian shirt, will be at the helm for CRI as he prepares to move to New York.
“It’s a little surreal, a little hard to imagine,” Curren said. “I’ve been coaching (at CRI) for 22 years. It’s a strange feeling, but I’m also excited to try new things, do some new stuff.”
Curren said he is leaving CRI because, after putting his career first, he is following his wife, Beth Belanger, who has recently secured a facility position at Hobart and William Smith College in the Finger Lakes region in Geneva, New York.
Coaching is not something that Curren is going to forget about, but mostly he said he would be working on the family’s new house and spending time with his wife and two young children. “Family time was a big part of this decision,” he said.
“It’s a really great opportunity for her and we’ve been, so far, really putting my career first and now it’s her turn to put her career first and she what she can do.”
But don’t count out the chances of seeing Curren around rowing again.
“I’ll probably do some coaching up in New York,” he said. “But it will be a very different place to be living, and wherever I’m coaching will certainly be different than Community Rowing, which is a really wonderful mixture of different things happening at the same time.
“You can’t get a busier place than that. It’s sad but it’s also exciting. It’s a bittersweet thing.”
Curren doesn’t have time to think about that at the moment. He has three-more days of racing to go and another potential team points trophy to win. CRI won the overall points trophy and the women’s points at the 2011 club national regatta.
In all, CRI has 102 crews entered here in both women’s and men’s events over the five-day regatta, the largest in the regatta by 42. The club with the next largest number of entries is Philadelphia’s Vesper Boat Club, which has 60.
Racing will resume Friday morning with finals at 8 a.m.
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