By Aidan McCann, Reporter
On July 26, senior Riley Lynch traveled to Trakai, Lithuania, for the 2017 World Rowing Junior Championships. Lynch, rowing with three other girls on the US team, placed third in the Junior Women’s Straight (without coxswain) Four final on August 6.
Lynch, age 17, rowed 2-seat in the U.S. Junior Four. They lost to China in the semi-finals by 0.86 seconds but managed to beat them in the finals, sealing a bronze for the US. The first and second-place boats in the final were Croatia and Romania, respectively.
To qualify for the regatta, Lynch attended two different training camps within the United States.
Lynch also traveled to a preliminary identification camp in February at Holy Names Academy in Seattle. Afterwards, she received an email inviting her to the selection camp in Princeton, New Jersey, which she flew to immediately after Youth Nationals in Florida last June.
At the Princeton camp, she had the opportunity to try out for the U.S. team. She had to work through many different tryouts in order to earn her seat in the four, including seat racing, which is a way of determining the fastest rower by doing a number of short races where the boats are made up of different combinations of candidates.
“The seat racing was more mentally tough than physically,” Lynch said.
She competed against girls from around the country and was enthusiastic about her chances to meet and get to know the other girls.
“It was super cool to be able to compete against and make friends with girls [from] all over the country,” Lynch said.
Lynch’s rowing ability is in a large part due to her hard work and dedication, as well as her stature; all of these are important components when competing at a high level.
“People who are successful are the ones who work really hard,” Lynch said. “It’s hard to just have a natural talent for rowing.”
She generally works out six days a week, as well as in the morning on Monday and PDD days (late start days at VHS). She stands at just over six feet tall, and while she believes that her height does give her an advantage, she doesn’t think that it plays the most important role in her success at an international level.
Her ability to get into colleges greatly increased when she was accepted into USRowing national team. The team’s eventual success raised the bar even higher as a potential recruit.
“Rowing has been one of the largest factors in my college search,” Lynch said. “It has provided me with the ability to see the schools I’m interested in much more closely than if I had not joined rowing.”
Lynch said that she was scared for her choice, as she wouldn’t even meet her teammates until after she had committed to a school. She had many schools reach out to her and has now committed to Stanford University.