Sarasota Crew U16 Women's Eight wins national championship

It felt unfair the 2025 U.S. Rowing Youth National Championships featured its most important races on Father’s Day. 

Hundreds of fathers who support their children all year long were standing around in sweltering heat at Nathan Benderson Park waiting patiently for their kids to race during an event that lasted nearly nine hours. 

Many of those fathers had traveled from across the corners of the country — from Washington, California, New York and Massachusetts — and some surely had to return to work sometime soon.

As the day unfolded, however, it came into focus how there was nowhere else these men would rather be on Father’s Day. 

Fathers raced down the shoreline to follow their children’s boats, jubilantly cheering them on. They high-fived anyone within reach when the races were over. 

Seth Wilson of Lakewood Ranch had plenty to celebrate. 

He biked down the beach to follow the Sarasota Crew's boat in the Women’s U16 Eight race. That boat included his twin daughters, Brooke and Addison Wilson. 

Photo by Vinnie Portell

Brooke, Addison and their crew mates — Gabrielle Davis, Maya Jewell, Megan Murdock, Isabella De Liz, Sydney Soboleski, Rose Ottaviano and Lillian Teague — won the 2,000 meter race in 6:56.81, more than five seconds ahead of the pack. 

“It’s an awesome experience,” Seth Wilson said. “They’ve been working so hard, and this year they’ve been really great. Each race I’ve been able to see them grow. Even from five or six weeks ago when they had their state race in the same lake here in Benderson to now, they were able to take 15 to 17 seconds off their time on the same course. The whole boat has been fantastic, and of course, I’m super proud of Addison and Brooke.” 

Addison, Brooke and their teammates had to wrestle with their nerves before competing for a national title June 15. 

They wrote motivational messages on each other's backs so they could be encouraged during each stroke. 

"We all had this thing where we wrote self pep-talk on each other's backs," Addison Wilson said. "Like, 'Lengthen, black out, you've got this.' It was just something that helped us push through the last 500 (meters)." 

More than 3,500 rowers competed in 130 finals events from Friday evening through late Sunday afternoon after two days of time trials and semifinal events. 

The finals were broken up from A through E classifications, with the top boats competing in the A class for national championships. 

Sarasota Crew had three boats make it to the A Finals — the Women’s U16 Eight (1st), the Men’s U17 Eight (3rd) and the Women’s Youth Four (6th). 

The Women’s U16 Eight national championship was a story of resilience. 

Coach Sebastian Spivey said the training season was disrupted by the hurricanes this past fall, which caused the team to use both Nathan Benderson Park and Blackburn Point Park in Osprey for training. Normally, all the training would have been done at Nathan Benderson Park.

The Women’s U16 Eight team fell short of a state championship in the Florida Scholastic Rowing Association Sweeps Championships in April, but that might have been the best thing to set them on course for the national championships. 

Unlike other areas of the country, Sarasota Crew typically doesn’t have as much competition in-state, which can make it difficult to rise to the challenge on a national stage. 

“We win, but the problem of winning a lot is that you have to continue to find ways to push yourself,” Spivey said. “It’s easy to always have a target to chase rather than to have a target on your back. They had a pretty stinging defeat, and that was the big motivating factor that got them here.”