The Automatic Qualifiers for the 2025 NCAA D1 Championship are all spoken for: Fairfield, UCF, Washington, and Yale claimed the final four automatic spots on Sunday to wrap up AQ Weekend.

A round up of all the AQ results and D1 conference championships is available here in row2k's NCAA coverage--and the D1 Selection show to announce the other 13 teams invited to this year's championships is set for Tuesday, May 20th at 5 pm, EST.

row2k caught up with Fairfield and Yale at the Cooper, and a full round up of all the AQ results and D1 conference championships is available here in row2k's NCAA coverage.

Ivy AQ: Yale

Yale came into the Ivy Championship this year firing on all cylinders, with undefeated crews, and fresh off a win against rival Princeton, the 2 seed, a month ago. Yale's season to date had them ranked at #5 in the latest Pocock CRCA poll, one spot ahead of Princeton.

The Yale 1V Eight

While an upset win by the Tiger 1V prevented a Yale sweep, they claimed the AQ bid by one point over Princeton and won the Ivy League team championship with golds in four of the six races. Princeton claimed the Ivy Championship itself, which goes to the winner of the V8.

For head coach Will Porter, the team championships is really what it all comes down to.

"The nice thing about the team trophy is that everybody participates in it, right down to the C four at this championship," he said. "I'm super proud of them and the work that went in and they're a great team.

"It's part of our philosophy and everything we do, how we run our program right from the beginning from recruiting, it's all team based, " Porter added. "We spend a lot of time training as a group, mixing boats, and making sure that we're communicating and connected to every kid in the program, and they've done a great job as a unit. Mia Levy has been an amazing captain and so all of that's really come together."

Levy said the team trophy has been the team's focus all along.

"This was our goal from the first day of practice, and honestly from the day after NCAAs last year," she said. "We've been so driven, so dedicated. We've believed in this so much, and to see it pay off, to see all of our hard work payoff is really amazing.

"It speaks to the culture we have on YWC. Everyone today came away with either a gold medal or a silver medal today, and regardless of what it was, we support each other, we love each other, we lift each other up, and it resulted in this amazing team points award.

"The feeling this year has been one of immense gratitude," Levy added, "and everyone is so willing and excited to work harder than we've ever worked before to try to reach new heights.

"So it's not really that we're holding ourselves to a certain expectation. We just are really excited to be our best, to go as fast as we can, and see how we stack up against really good competition."

"Each crew raced well and each crew raced hard," said Porter. "The Princeton varsity is very good. We knew that and we took our shot. We weren't quite on today, and in these conditions, when it's this fast, it's hard to come back on somebody like that. They got out a little bit, and that was that. But that's round two, and we've got round three to coming up."

The bow pair of the Princeton 1V called the race very exciting, and were thrilled to help power Princeton to its eight consecutive 1V win and Ivy title.

"It's been a couple weeks since we raced them," said 2 seat Zoe Scheske. "We've been working pretty hard to just see how much closer we could get and today we just wanted to put it all out there."

"We were three seconds off Yale when we raced and lost, so it was all about gaining those three seconds," added bow Kerry Grundlingh. "There was just a lot of momentum and excitement when we got off the start ahead."

"We wanted to really make a statement and be up," said Scheske. "We weren't really up at any point in our first race with them and we wanted to turn that around."

"We were in a good position leading the race," agreed Grundlingh, "and with about 750 meters to go, I thought, okay, we got this. We can win."

Princeton will have to wait for an official At-Large invitation to return to the NCAAs. Those will be announced on Tuesday at 5 pm EDT.

MAAC AQ: Fairfield

The last AQ race of the weekend might just have been the most dramatic: Fairfield claimed the their first ever AQ in the MAAC, but it took a whole series of events and then a gutsy "row it like you stole it" effort by their 1V--and also by Stetson's 1V--to make it happen.

Fairfield, the MAAC Champion; Sophia Savage at center with trophy

At the outset, Jacksonville was looking to lock up its ninth straight MAAC title, and looked to be battling for it with Sacred Heart after winning a 1-2 finish in the Varsity Four. In the 2V final, Jacksonville won again, and a crab by Sacred Heart in the day's really tough tailwind chop dropped them all the way to fourth. That put Jacksonville in a good spot to win again with a good 1V result, so long as they either stayed ahead of Sacred Heart or finished just behind them.

Enter Fairfield's 1V, who set the terms of the final by grabbing an early lead, and also Stetson in lane six, who charged out with Fairfield and held on for the silver. Jacksonville took third ahead of both Marist and Sacred Heart in fifth, but that one team gap between themselves and Fairfield left both with 47 points--and Fairfield claimed the title on the 1V tie-breaker.

The 1V found out about--and celebrated--the team win while they were still on the water

"We had the mindset that we were going to be competing against really fast teams," said Fairfield senior Catherine Morrissey, who rowed at seven. "We haven't proven ourselves in the 1V in a while, and I think the biggest thing was just going out there and racing for each other and trusting each other and at the end of the day, it worked."

Fairfield has only won the MAAC once before, back in 2000 before the NCAA AQ era.

"If you told me this was going to happen, when I was a freshman," said Morrissey, "I wouldn't have believed you."

"We have the most resilient team I've seen in all four years," she added. "And our entire race, we rowed for one of our teammates, Sophia Savage, who's currently beginning the remission stage of her cancer. She would have been in that boat and we rowed for her."

Savage, whose diagnosis this year was one of the challenges the team faced together, did not compete as she completes her treatment, but joined the team on the podium--and every member of the squad wore a shirt with her name and a ribbon on the back.

"This year, the theme for our whole athletic department was 'Forged, Resilient, Built for Life,'" said head coach David Patterson. "And we've had so many kicks in the teeth this year, and there's a lot we had to work through to be able to stay united and stick together. It goes back to that theme we had at the start of the year, and we really had to stick to it to come out well the other side."

The Fairfield 1V Eight

It took the crew some time this season to find its stride.

"In practice every day, things were going really well, but we'd get on the race course and it just wasn't translating," said Patterson. "Then just two weeks ago, we had a duel with Sacred Heart, who was potentially going to be the one seed, and the 1V eight came out on top there.

"That was the lift that we needed to go into this championships, to know that the speed we have in practice is something that we could put on the race course, and we just had to make sure we did it today."

The last time Fairfield won the 1V at the MAAC was back in 2013, the first year of AQ bids, but they missed out on the team championship and the bid on points that year, to Marist. This year, with their first MAAC title in 25 years, Fairfield will finally get take a 1V win all the way to the NCAAs.

Big Ten AQ: Washington

Washington swept the Big Ten Championships in Indianapolis, and is the third former PAC-12 team to make an immediate impact in its new conference, just like Stanford and Oregon State did in the ACC and WCC this weekend.

In addition to winning the Big Ten's AQ, Washington became just the second team besides Ohio State in 2018 to sweep all the races in the 25 year history of the Big Ten Championships.

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Rutgers was second as a team and Michigan, last year's champion, finished in third.

Big 12 AQ: UCF

UCF claimed its first Big 12 Championship in Sarasota. All of UCF's five previous NCAA appearances came from wins in the American Athletic Conference, which no longer sponsors a rowing championships.

The Knights, polling at #15, posted a clean sweep of the regatta. Tulsa finished in second in the team standings.

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Information on all nine of the conference championships that offered AQ bids this year is available in row2k's D1 NCAA AQ Tracker here.

At-Large selections will be announced on Tuesday, May 20th at 5 pm EDT; follow this link for broadcast information about the 2025 NCAA Championship Selection Shows.