The 97th Stotesbury Cup Regatta ended with St. Joe's Prep and Mount Saint Joe's back on the medals dock again, capturing the women's and men's Senior Eights at the regatta that without question means the most to their programs.

The Stotes is special to all the scholastic athletes who make what amounts to a pilgrimage--complete with chuck wagons--to Kelly Drive each year in May, but The Prep and The Mount are on a home team roll this decade, keeping the Senior Eight trophies local.

Prep Brings Back the Broom

For St. Joe's Prep, winning the Stotesbury Cup itself in the 1V capped a second full sweep of the eights in as many years. So, yes, they took down the broom that hangs in their boathouse just 1k from the finish line and brought it to the party. It made its way down to the grandstand and, eventually into the river when the whole team went for a celebratory swim.

"We just got cemented in history with everybody else who's rowed for The Prep," said Braeden Montgomery, 4 seat and senior captain of the Prep squad. "It means a lot."

"We've worked really hard ever since the beginning our freshman year, all the seniors, and then everybody else who's in the boat," Montgomery added.

"It's been 1230 days since we started our first day of crew and it's really special to us to be able to be a part of the history of this awesome regatta."

St. Joe's does have what may be the best home course advantage in the sport: a boathouse full of teammates midway down the course, so we asked Montgomery what it feels like to sit in a Prep eight sweeping past home base in the lead on Stotesbury Saturday.

"It means the world because it just gets super loud," Montgomery said. "We can hear all our boys in the boathouse and all the parents who work so hard to keep us fed and everything. It just means a lot to be able to do this, not only for ourselves, but also for them."

Ahead of their race, The Prep 1V got to watch the eights wins pile up as the Freshmen, Junior, and Second Eights swept past the boathouse. The Prep eights won every round of the regatta on the weekend.

"We just get so excited," said Montgomery about seeing his teammates winning. "It's a cumulative effect. The first win goes by and it just keeps on rolling."

This is the Prep's fourth sweep, and they've now done it two years in a row. As we reported in part last year, Head Coach John Fife has been part of them all: as a high schooler himself in the stroke seat on the 1V in 1997, as a young coach of the frosh eight in 2008, and now as the head coach leading the Prep to this back-to-back achievement.

"Point of Legacy" For The Mount

For The Mount 1V, it was the fifth win in a row for the Robert Engman Trophy, and a fresh set of athletes receiving the necklaces that replicate the sphere atop the trophy.

The Mount 2V also won, keeping the Irish American Chamber Cup for a third straight year, and head coach Megan Kennedy now has The Mount's name on those trophies more times than any other school.

row2k caught up with the Mount's three senior captains to ask what makes winning at Stotes so special to their program.

"I would say it's really a point of legacy for us," said Clara Pagano, who rows the bow seat of the Mount 1V. "We are known for winning Stotes and it's kind of our responsibility in the first eight to uphold that. Being a part of the 1V means making sure you give all you've got in the race, doing it together as a whole. Because without being together, we can't win it. Being a team and being the best we can be makes us who we are."

The Mount wins 1V wins a lot of races of course, and came in fresh off a win at Mid-Atlantic Youth Championships, so we asked Caroline Johnson, the 1V 6 seat, what makes Stotes different.

"What pushes us to the finish line and pushes us across first is knowing that all of our teammates are down in the grandstands," said Johnson. "I think that just makes the win a million times better."

"The culture on this team, it's hard to come by, but what we have is really special," she added. "It's good feeling when we shove off the dock knowing that we have our whole team behind us. They have our backs and they're going to be waiting for us in the grandstands."

Molly Maher, the third captain, was one of those teammates waiting--and screaming--in the grandstand, wearing the gold medal she had just won in the 7 seat of the 2V.

"We were very nervous going into the races because we haven't really raced a lot of these crews," Maher said about the 2V's racing. "After the time trial, anything can happen, so our plan was to go out and row as hard as we could and not concentrate on what other folks were doing."

"That was the key to the race in our boat," Maher said. "Just stay internal and trust each other. To have confidence in each other that we could do it together, because that's really all you need."

The 1V had that same level of trust to get it done, said Johnson.

"We've come so far from when we first started rowing as a crew in the fall. The peak of Mount crew is the Stotes. It's one of our favorite races. So it's just realizing how far we've come and how we've learned to trust each other and honestly just have fun rowing with each other. Because this is fun. Winning is fun. And being around this team is great."

"We talked before our race about how much we put into this very moment," added Pagano, "the hard work we put in. Being able to translate that into the race was key for us today."

The Mount 1V won the race in a shell deicated to memory of Caroline Kyle, a Class of 2021 graduate who tragically passed away last summer. Kyle was a Stotesbury champion herself, winning gold in 2019 in the Light Eight and a silver in the 2V her senior year, so to win the Stotes in her memory meant a great deal to Coach Kennedy and the entire Mount team.

More To Follow

If you haven't already, you can catch all of our photo coverage of Stotes and what may well be the happiest place in rowing--the Stotes medal dock--in the row2k galleries.

More to follow on the singles winners and some of the best Stotes stories we heard this year in our second report.