Bringing world-class racing to North Carolina, the Lenny Peters Cup, to be held Saturday, April 12, 2025, will involve a Ryder Cup-style sculling format in which U.S. senior national team athletes will go head-to-head against national and Olympic team rowers from around the world.
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Triad United Rowing Association, which rows on Oak Hollow Lake in High Point, North Carolina, hosts High Point Autumn Rowing Festival in the fall and North Carolina Rowing Championships in the spring, and has invited international crews to the Festival Park Course in the past. This is the first time USRowing has gotten involved.
“In the fall we had Oxford and Ukraine come out and race some of the local universities such as Duke, High Point, and Old Dominion,” said head Triad United head coach Gene Kininmonth. “Casey Galvanek came to watch this fall, was impressed, and gave some good feedback to USRowing about what we’re doing here. From there I had a call with Josy Verdonkschot to explore how we could get some national team rowers down here to compete against foreign competition. We hashed out that sculling might be the area we could have the most impact. From here we came up with the Ryder Cup format.”
Galvanek, the 2024 Rowing News Coach of the Year, coached the U.S. men’s four to a gold medal at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Verdonkschot serves as USRowing’s Chief High Performance Officer.
“Josy will select the top four male and four female scullers to represent the U.S. team based on Speed Order in the spring,” said Kininmonth. “I’ve been sending out invitations to scullers around the world who won medals at the Paris Olympics. We will do a draw a couple of days beforehand to see which scullers from around the world have a race against U.S. scullers. Based on that there will be eight races for eight points. The US men’s and women’s quads will race against the top four scullers from overseas for four points each. We will also do two mixed quad races.”
This year’s racing will feature a one-day format. In the future there may be room to expand the regatta to multiple days to allow for more competition.
“It’s in conjunction with the North Carolina Rowing Championships and we already get more than 1,000 rowers coming in for that and 2,000-3,000 spectators,” said Kininmonth. “We will have a packed house. It’s a good thing for the sport of rowing to have people cheer on our U.S. rowers here in the United States and not just watch them on TV as they race in Europe.”
Kininmonth, along with USRowing, hopes the event can bring attention to sculling and small boat racing in the United States such that the public will be able to recognize the nation’s top scullers.
“If we can put a spotlight on sculling and get people interested in that I think we may see an American standing on the top of the podium at the Olympics one day,” said Kininmonth. “If we can do that, it puts a huge spotlight on our sport in the U.S.—when you get a face and a name to the sports. It was really amazing and wonderful that our men’s four won and our men’s eight got a bronze in Paris, but if you asked anybody on the street to name one person in one of those boats they couldn’t. This is a small step in that direction.”
