STAFF REPORTS | PHOTO BY LISA WORTHY

Michelle Sechser and Sorin Koszyk are each “Head of the Charles,” the traditional title for the sculler who covers a river course fastest in a time trial-style “head” race.

Both Sechser and Koszyk, who each were part of qualifying U.S. doubles for the Olympics at September’s World Rowing Championships, are lightweights (formerly, in Koszyk’s case), who beat formidable fields, including current Olympic champion Emma Twigg in the women’s field, at the world’s largest three-day rowing regatta.

USRowing National Team entries won both the men’s and women’s championship-eight events, ahead of top college crews Yale, Stanford, Michigan, Virginia, and Brown in the women’s event. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Northeastern, Brown, Washington, Dartmouth, and Penn all finished in the top 10 of the men’s event.

There were fewer colleges in the women’s top 10 because of how deep and fast the USRowing women are. Having qualified for every sweep event as well as the single and both doubles for the Olympics, the U.S. women raced what were essentially two rowers’ eights and a scullers’ eight, with the sweep rowers finishing one-two with less than a quarter-second between them, and the scullers coming in sixth.

With 90 entries, the women’s youth-eights event at the Charles is the greatest collection of American junior rowing outside of June’s USRowing Youth National Championships. As in Sarasota, southwestern Connecticut crews topped the results, with RowAmerica Rye taking first and third places, Greenwich Crew second, and Saugatuck third. On the boys’ side, St, Paul’s School of London beat second-place Saugatuck and third-place Greenwich by over 20 seconds.

Koszyk didn’t just win; he shattered the course record (previously set by lightweight Andrew Campbell in 2014) by 14 seconds and picked up $10,000 in prize money, a new feature of the regatta. The Charles continues to evolve from its roots as a fun training diversion brought to Cambridge and Boston by Englishman Ernie Arlett, who was Northeastern’s first head coach and in 1964 established the Huskies’ formidable varsity-rowing program.

Sechser, who won back-to-back silver medals at the last two Worlds with different partners in the lightweight double, upset defending Head of the Charles Twigg as well as U.S. National Team openweight single sculler Kara Kohler. Sechser also won $10,000.

“You have to just fearlessly go up against these people, even though on paper, you know they’re taller, bigger, better, stronger, more experienced, and so it was a ton of fun,” said Sechser after the race. “That’s where the races are won, I think, is the fearlessness.”

STAFF REPORTS | PHOTO BY LUKE REYNOLDS

Atlanta’s St. Andrew Rowing Club’s women’s U19 eight finished eight seconds faster than the Cincinnati Juniors to win the 49-entry event at the 2023 Head of the Hooch in early November in Chattanooga. Chicago beat Milwaukee in the boy’s event.

Florida’s Belen Jesuit Crew barely beat the men’s youth U19 coxed four from Washington state’s Sammamish Rowing Association, with St. Louis’s A boat finishing third. Cincinnati Juniors won the womens’ youth event.

Youth quads, with 50 entries each for the men’s and women’s divisions, proved almost as popular as the coxed fours and eights among youth crews, with Indianapolis RC winning the men’s U19 event and the all-girls Founders Rowing Club of Dallas winning the women’s U19 quad.

One of the world’s biggest weekend rowing events, the Hooch drew 2,198 entries (the largest, Head of the Charles, got 2,599 this year). For its first 15 years, the Atlanta Rowing Club held the Head of the Chattahoochee on its namesake river in Roswell, Ga., just north of Atlanta.

As the event grew, first to 200 crews, and then over 500, it needed more space and moved in 1997 to the newly constructed Olympic venue at Lake Lanier. By 2004, the regatta attracted more than 1,000 boats and moved again to the Tennessee River in Chattanooga and became known as the Head of the Hooch, the “Last of the Great Fall Regattas.”