After a disastrous Stotesbury Cup Regatta rain washout in mid-May, select area crews participated in the Memorial Day weekend Scholastic Rowing Association of America Regatta (SRAA).

Crews must qualify to race in SRAAs through high placings in designated events earlier in the season. Qualification eliminates the need for holding head races (based solely on time) to winnow down unwieldy numbers of entrants, and all the competition occurs in side-by-side six-lane contests.

Friday saw heat races, with qualifiers in some events advancing directly into the Saturday afternoon finals, while those in categories with a larger number of entries went through a semifinal stage on Saturday.

Eighteen boats from five area schools made it into the SRAAs, with seven moving on into semifinals. The other six qualifiers were seeded into the final round. In the end, Penn Charter secured a silver medal in the girls' junior double and Germantown Friends took a bronze in the girls' junior quad. Mount St. Joseph Academy (all girls) earned a silver in the junior eight and a bronze in the second eight.

The scholastic championships were staged on Camden's Cooper River, not the swift-flowing Schuylkill.

Cooper is as close to a still-water course (such as a lake) as a river can get.

While there were occasional bursts of rain and some strong wind, these didn't alter the schedule.

One Germantown Academy girls’ junior quad boat earned a place in the regatta. In this event, there were three heats on Friday, with the top two finishers in each going directly to the finals. The Patriots (Sophia Song, Alex Brown, Mirabelle Hayes, Nina Sager) came in third in heat three.

In the first heat, Springside Chestnut Hill (Charlotte Trayes, Elizabeth O'Brien, Iris Dobeck, Ariya Goswami) placed first with the second fastest time in all three heats, while Germantown Fiends (Isabella Ammon, Nola Schaenen, Kate Mardeusz, Sophia McCrea) was second.

In the finals, the fastest boat from the heats, Waterford School (near Salt Lake City, Utah), won by more than six seconds in 5:31.06 seconds, while GFS took bronze in 5:40.83;  SCH came in sixth.

On Saturday afternoon, many crews had steering struggles when the windspeed ramped up and pushed vessels to the port side of their assigned lanes.

The boys' senior single was so popular, a semifinal stage was needed. After getting through the heats, Penn Charter's Jackson Stoddard posted the fastest semifinal time overall as he won the second section. In the first semifinal, Alex Young of GFS came in first, 0.21 seconds ahead of Michigan's Traverse City High School. 

In the finals, Traverse City blew away the field, winning by 10 seconds over runner-up Holy Spirit (Absecon, NJ). Charter's Stoddard finished fifth. The Tigers' Young was sixth.

For area oarslingers, the only other sculling semifinal was the boys' junior double. Moving past the Friday heats, the GFS tandem of Luca Farrell and Aiden Dunleavy finished third in their semifinal with the fifth-best overall time, and a fifth-place outcome in the finals.

Two Germantown Friends quads that went right from heats to finals were the girls' freshman quad and boys' senior quad. The ladies (Theodora Farrell, Leela Rajagopalan, Ivy Schaenen, Kavya Senthil) ultimately finished fourth. In their final, the boys (Anand Rajagopalan, Jasper Furnas, Zeke Hammarhead, Shachar Pinto) came in sixth.

PC's girls' junior double, the marquee boat for the Quakers all season, was second in its heat race, roughly 10 seconds behind New York's Augustine Classical Academy. Augustine won the gold, but Charter's Hannah Aldinger and Liliana DeMartinis came close, taking silver as they crossed the line two-and-a-half seconds behind the New Yorkers.

Springside Chestnut Hill girls' senior quad earned a spot in the finals, a contest that quickly developed into a two-boat battle between Waterford and Michigan's Skyline High School. Waterford opened things up at the end to win by four seconds, but Skyline was still more than 20 seconds ahead of bronze medalist Seattle Prep. The Blue Devils (Evelyn Seawright, Nadia Stockman, Emma Schwartz, Caitlin Keough) came in fifth.

The MSJ freshman eight (Cox: Aislynn Costello, Sophia Prosperi, Molly Groark, Christian Robinson, Addison McKenna, Ava Kristel, Callie Zapalac, Ainsley Short, Megan Bell) finished just off the podium in fourth place, but at least the Magic had regional bragging rights: medals went to crews from Illinois, Florida, and California.

In the senior eight, the Mounties (Kayleigh Costello, Kate Marsden, Addy Smith, Olivia Duffy, Ava Smith, Eva Getty, Zoe Truitt, Vanessa Ksiazek, Katie Duffy) battled all spring with Montclair (N.J.) High School, but at SRAAs the gold went to Florida's Winter Park High School. Montclair captured silver, while the Magic came in fourth behind suburban Chicago’s New Trier High School.

The chief rivalry for the Mount junior eight this season was with Ocean City High School. O.C. edged ahead midway and jacked up its stroke rate to win by six seconds. Mount St. Joe (Cox: Alice Baker, Ella Kurek, Marianna Rambo, Shay Gura, Aubrey Sheehan, Olivia Weissman, Maddie Dudley, Elyse McGlynn, Addi Ross) came away with silver, ahead of New Trier.

In the second eight, Winter Park and New Trier went one-two in the finals, but the Mounties (Cox: Sydney Fluke, Molly Chipman, Addison Marques, Amelia McElroy, Ramsey Tabor, Anna Rybny, Maddie Kristel, Alexia Levine, Ryan Salvitti) snagged bronze, just 0.35 seconds behind the Illinois eight.