Treble gold for Mount crew at Stotesbury

	The gold medal senior eight crew from Mount St. Joe’s: (front row, left to right) Mary Grace Maggiano, Margaret Flynn, Sarah Opper, Meredith Walsh; (back row, left to right) Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald, Coach Mike McKenna, Julie Powers, Megan McCusker, Amanda Chain, Emily Walker
Mount St. Joseph’s gold medal lightweight eight: (left to right) Steph Farris, Liz Stanowski, Saibh Madden, Christine Laskowski, Jenn Young, Mollie Flynn, Marykate Kelly, Jane Mieczkowski, Kelly O’Neill, Coach Mike McKenna.

by TOM UTESCHER

Two gold medals arrived in a Chestnut Hill household last Saturday evening, as sisters Margaret and Mollie Flynn of Mount St. Joseph Academy returned home from the Stotesbury Regatta.

Mollie, a sophomore, wields the number five oar in the Magic’s Lightweight Eight, an undefeated crew which kept its streak intact with a first-place finish at Stotesbury, the nation’s largest scholastic regatta. Her colleagues in this craft are seniors Christine Laskowski (six seat) and Saibh Madden (seven), juniors Marykate Kelly (two) and Kelly O’Neill (three), and sophomores Steph Farris (four), Jane Mieczkowski (cox), Liz Stanowski (bow), Jenn Young (stroke).

The lightweights won in five minutes, seven and one-tenth seconds, hitting the wire 5.68 seconds ahead of runner-up Holy Spirit of Absecon, NJ.

Margaret Flynn’s Senior Eight has given off glints of promise all spring, but had been overshadowed by other crews in the 2005 Manny Flick series and the Philadelphia City Championships on May 8. At Stotes, the MSJ flagship put it all together, racing in the reputedly-slow sixth lane but beating out defending champ Spirit for the gold, 5:02.59 to 5:04.85. Two other boats were right in it, as even fourth-place Lawrenceville was just three-and-a-half seconds off the lead.

A 12th grader headed for Penn, Flynn rides the bow seat in the boat. Behind her are fellow upperclassmen Sarah Opper (cox) and Julie Powers (seven), juniors Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald (six), Mary Grace Maggiano (four) and Meredith Walsh (five), and sophomores Amanda Chain (three), Megan McCusker (stroke) and Emily Walker (two).

A third gold medal went to the Magic’s Freshman Eight, a powerhouse all season long. The team’s Second Eight secured a bronze medal, and a fifth eight-oared shell just missed making the finals in the JV class. The Mount also entered a junior four in the regatta, but the boat was unable to advance out of the head race phase of the competition.

In only its sixth season as a full-fledged interscholastic team, the Mount program, led by founding coach Meg Kennedy, has proven that it can develop young rowers and can successfully restructure its line-ups. The freshman eight, obviously, features an entirely new roster, but so does this year’s varsity eight, while Madden is the only returning member of the Mount light eight that struck Stotesbury gold in 2004.

Last weekend, the Magic’s JV Eight (Kaitlin McDonald [cox], Cara Crumlish [stroke], Ali Bono, Kara Lederer, Katie Bolger, Erin McGann, Katie Klein, Liz Keenan, and Kristin O’Neill) moved on from the head races with the sixth-best time out of 38 contenders. Placing third in one of three semifinal races, the jayvee’s missed the finals by one spot, even though they were faster than one of the boats that advanced from another heat.

Ninth of 29 boats in its head racing session, the Mount Second Eight kept on going with a second-place showing in its semifinal bout. Crew members Danielle Ohman (cox), Christine Quinn (stroke), Sarah Strano, Gina DiDomenico, Denny Belcher, Grace O’Shea, Liz McDonald, Anne Marie Bonner, and Liz Thiers took home bronze medals from the finals, crossing the line at 5:14.10. Spirit won in 5:10.60, Thomas Jefferson of Alexandria, VA snagged silver at 5:11.94, and in fourth behind Mount St. Joe was Maryland’s BBC (Bethesda-Chevy Chase) in 5:16.64.

The Mount freshmen, coached by Jim Glavin, continued to impress. They qualified almost eight seconds ahead of the closest of their 35 head race rivals, and then posted the best time in the entire semifinal round as they easily won the first of three heats.

Taking one of the other semis, Saratoga was within three seconds of the Mount, but in the finals the local ninth graders (Devon Stewart [cox], Lawren Kieffer [stroke], Meredith Weber, Meg Kehan, Hilary O’Shea, Meg Farris, Megan Schluckebier, Colleen McNamara, and Jenna O’Neill) won in 5:02.83 for a margin of 4.74 seconds over the second-place New Yorkers. Washington’s National Cathedral Prep was third in 5:09.76.

Mollie Flynn’s light eight came up huge in its head race with a 12.38- second margin over number two Walt Whitman (Bethesda, MD). Each of these crews won its semifinal heat, with the Magic recording the best time but with Whitman now just three seconds behind. Another dangerous rival, Ocean City, had dropped out during the head races, as Friday’s cold, rainy weather caused several cases of hypothermia amongst the crew.

Despite feeling some jitters before the finals, the Magic started very aggressively, as usual. They were accustomed to breaking rival crews by putting on a 20-stroke burst at full power early in the middle 500 meters of the 1500-meter coruse, and the tactic worked for them once more.

“Once we took our 20 and we pulled away, we knew we could keep [the lead] till the end,” the younger Flynn sister said. “We wanted to do it for the seniors in the boat, Christine and Saibh.”

Mount St. Joe won comfortably in 5:04.37, with Holy Spirit second in 5:10.05, and with Whitman settling for the bronze medal in 5:13.54.

The Magic’s senior eight did not have the same legacy of success to fall back on. There were some good outcomes during the Manny Flick races early in the spring, but no real breakthrough performances. Then, at the city championships on May 8, the Mount finished fifth in the finals, almost 11 seconds off the winning pace.

Sixth out of 40 entries in the Stotesbury head races, the Mount came in second in one of the three semifinals, rallying from a mid-race letdown to finish seven one-hundreths of a second behind the heat winner, Lawrenceville. It was good enough for a berth in the championship race on Saturday afternoon, but not good enough to secure one of the desirable middle lanes for the finals.

Instead, the Magic were assigned to lane six, farthest from the east bank of the river, and closest to the shores of Peters Island, about three-quarters of the way down the course. Here, the tip of the island cleaves the current and can diminish the positive effects of a cross-tailwind blowing from the west bank of the Schuylkill.

Mike McKenna, who coaches the Mount’s senior and light eights, noted “In the local rowing community, lane six is known as the ‘Lane of Death.’ You don’t get any push from the winds, and the current actually backs up off the island.”

The key for any lane sixer is to power out to a healthy lead before encountering the doldrums alongside the island, and then muscle through the dead zone. The problem was that the Mount girls aren’t the brawniest on the block; four of them competed as lightweights last year.

“I told the girls they had to have open water [between themselves and rival boats] by the time they hit the 500-meter mark just to have a chance to medal,” said McKenna. “That ticked them off; I think that really motivated them.”

Margaret Flynn pointed out, “Everybody in the boat has a lot of pride. We thought we had what it takes to give a great performance and win, but we knew that nobody else would ever think that unless we went out and proved it. We know a lot of the other crews are bigger, but the way we look at it is that they have more weight to pull down the river.”

Opper, the MSJ coxswain who has accepted a rowing scholarship to Duke, felt the boat get a good jump off the starting line.

“We took a five at the Canoe Club [roughly a third of the way down the course], which was something we’d committed to do,” she related. “That really got us moving, then in the middle we took a 15 like we usually do. All this spring we’d been trying to get everything working together, and now you could really feel it.”

Coach McKenna related, “The crowd all along the last part of the course was chanting ‘Lane six! Lane six!’ They knew that that’s usually the big knock on Stotesbury, that there’s a bad lane. I guess it wasn’t that bad, because St. Joe’s Prep came down the next race in lane six and also won.”

Mount St. Joe’s captured the gold medal with a 2.26-second split over Holy Spirit, which fought off Thomas Jefferson to take the silver by half-a-second.

Overjoyed at the broad-based success of her team, Meg Kennedy pointed out “This is what Mike and I set out to do from the start, which was build a program and not just build a fast boat for one year.

“Of course, we start out each season with a significant advantage over most schools,” she continued. “We start out with Mount girls, and when Mount girls decide they want to do something, they put in the work and they go out and do it well.”