Arlington high-school teams won two premier races during the 2026 Virginia Scholastic Rowing Association championship regatta.
The Wakefield Warriors won the girls varsity eight high-school crown for the sixth year in a row. The shell’s winning time was 5:10.07 on the 1,500-meter Sandy Run Regional Park course along the Occoquan Reservoir.
The Wakefield girls are the first eight shell to win so many state titles in a row since the 1980s.
On the boys side, the Yorktown Patriots won their second-straight varsity eight crown, finishing in 4:34.4. Prior to that, Yorktown last won a varsity eight boys state title in 2009.
The Wakefield girls won with five new members of the varsity eight this season, plus a new head coach in Sarah Vest.
“The girls were super-dedicated and competitive and showed extra motivation because of the streak of winning state titles,” said Vest, who rowed for Wakefield and is a 2017 graduate of the school. “They wanted to keep it going, and felt they had a lot to prove.”
The returning members of the Wakefield eight are junior coxswain Riley Gaul and senior rowers and captains Amelie Przystawik and Emory Laughry, as well as senior rower Anna Duall. Duall will row in college at Bucknell University and Loughry at Boston University, while Gaul is expected to be a coxswain at Notre Dame in 2028.
The new rowers for the 2026 Wakefield eight are juniors Olivia Barr, Margy Morris, Marina Smart and Lorelei Kim and senior Annabel Cridge.
Vest explained how a delayed start to the season by two weeks on the water because of a sewage spill on the Potomac River made the campaign more challenging for Wakefield and the other Arlington teams.
“That motivated them even more,” Vest said.
The Yorktown boys returned seven members to this year’s state-champion varsity eight, which consisted of eight seniors. The one junior is Noah Starck.
The seniors are coxswain Matthew Gaull and rowers Fedir Melnyk, Eliot Koide, Declan Leighton, Thomas Totten, Alexander Wilson, Riley Nelson and Lachlan Vaughn. Captains are Koide, Totten and Gaull.
Totten will row at the U.S. Naval Academy, Leighton at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Nelson will row for the club team at Penn State.
“The experience and base speed for the team were there this season so the expectations were to win the state again,” Yorktown boys coach Fabriana Velasquez told ARLnow. “They’ve been dialed in, have kept a good mindset, have been receptive to changes and have gone headfirst into anything difficult.”
Second in each race in the state varsity-eight championships were the Wakefield boys (4:38.7) and Yorktown girls (5:11.5).
Yorktown had a number of other eights that placed high at the state regatta. On the boys side, the second, third and fourth eights won races and the freshman eight was third. For the girls, the freshman eight was third.
Still left on the schedule for the Arlington crew teams are the annual Stotesbury Cup Regatta in Philadelphia, followed by the Scholastic Rowing Association of America’s National Championship Regatta in Tennessee.
