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Ridgewood NJ, Ridgewood Crew’s spectacular 2025 spring rowing season came to an impressive climax at the four-day 2024 US Rowing Youth National Championships in Sarasota, Florida. Racing on the 2,000-meter course at Nathan Benderson Park in hot and muggy conditions, Ridgewood’s 18 rowers joined a massive field of roughly 4,000 athletes from 230 clubs from across the country. In total, Ridgewood sent six of its eight boats through to the semifinals with three ultimately placing in the top 10 in the nation, including one bronze medal performance.
“Each year, the USRowing Youth Nationals gets bigger and more competitive,” said Ridgewood Crew Head Coach Boris Roque-Alvarez. “This regatta is yet another step up in difficulty and is a fitting final test for our season. Here, you race against the biggest rowing clubs in the country, so to excel against a field like this really says a lot about a team’s level of success. Racing our way into six semifinals, two grand finals, and winning a medal shows how special our team is.”
The team’s top performer at this year’s Youth Nationals was 15-year-old freshman Graham Richardson, racing in the Mens Under 17 Single Sculls event. Against a field of 25 other competitors, Richardson won both Thursday’s time trial and his Friday semifinal before finishing third in Sunday’s grand final. That last race was a nail biter from start to finish with Richardson and several other boats trading narrow leads throughout. Ultimately, he took home the bronze in a blisteringly fast race where just 1.05 seconds separated all three podium finishers (7:20.83).
Notably, the freshman’s bronze was the first medal for the team at a US Youth Nationals regatta since 2013, when another Ridgewood male single sculler, Anthony Criscitiello, also placed third. Richardson’s bronze at this year’s Youth Nationals also joins the silver medal he won last month at the 2025 Scholastic High School National Championships, where he raced as the stroke seat in the team’s Junior Quad boat.
Ridgewood freshman Graham Richardson was the team’s top performer at the 2025 USRowing Youth National Championships in Sarasota, Florida, taking home a bronze medal in the Mens Under 17 Single Sculls race. (Photo credit: Reed Richardson)
Ridgewood’s varsity boat of sophomore Tristan Riedel, juniors Sam Scharfenberg and Will Nasr, and senior Lucas Evers raced their way into the team’s other grand final appearance, in the Mens Youth Quad Sculls event. Their journey to Sunday was anything but easy, however. In their time trial, the boat faced stiff competition from 32 other entries in one of the country’s marquee rowing categories. Despite this, they rowed their way to fourth place to qualify for the semifinals on Friday.
That semifinal race may have been their most challenging of the year. With only the top four boats advancing to Sunday’s grand final, the boat found itself sitting in sixth place near the halfway point. Thanks to a powerful surge, the quartet slowly picked off competitors, scrambling to third place in a heart-pounding race where second through fifth place ended up in a four-way photo finish, with just .44 seconds separating the boats.
In Sunday’s final, Riedel, Scharfenberg, Nasr, and Evers capped off their highly successful varsity quad season, which also included finishing as runner-up at the 2025 Scholastic High School National Championships, by coming in seventh against a stacked field (6:20.26).
The lone girls boat for Ridgewood was also the team’s youngest — and it too finished in the top 10 in a promising national debut. Eighth grader Jaya Suri and freshman Zurie Yela shrugged off a difficult semifinal race on Friday, where the pair faced a sudden squall that kicked up pounding rain and waves as high as the top of the boat, to finish a strong second in Saturday’s Womens Under 17 Double Sculls B final, ranking them 10th in the nation overall (8:09.49).
Other notable Ridgewood performances included the Mens Youth Double Sculls event, where the team qualified two boats through to the B final. Juniors Michael Shkop and Luciano Saladino, along with juniors Matt Moomjy and Uhmjoo Han, finished fourth (6:49.46) and seventh (7:03.11), respectively, in that race, for a ranking of 12th and 15th in the nation.
Ridgewood’s second quad boat at the regatta featured three lightweight rowers — juniors James Ryan, Daniel Hept, and Paul Hallowell — and freshman Kai Bissie. Racing in the Mens Youth 2V Quad Sculls event, the boat eked out a third-place finish in the B final to claim an 11th place national ranking (6:34.11).
Bissie was the only Ridgewood rower to pull double duty at Youth Nationals, as he also competed in the Mens Under 17 Double Sculls event, where he and fellow freshman David Pasternak fell short of qualifying for the semifinals, but still scored a hard-fought victory in the event’s C final, winning by just .09 seconds (7:18.47).
Sophomores Gabriel Dozortsev and Kamrad Sarmad also competed in the same Mens Under 17 Double Sculls event, coming in fourth in the C final (7:23.49).
Full times and results for Ridgewood Crew at the 2025 USRowing Youth National Championships (https://usrowing.regatta.time-team.com/usrowing-youth-national/2025).
In the program’s 20-year history, Ridgewood Crew rowers have competed and excelled in both national and international competitions and its athletes have attracted interest from top rowing colleges and universities around the country. Ridgewood Crew offers several ways for you to experience our mission: join the team, volunteer, or donate. Student athlete programs begin with Learn-To-Row for middle schoolers. For more information contact Ridgewood Crew at http://www.ridgewoodcrew.com.
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