Wayland-Weston's Thomas Lee and Alex Dremov place third at Youth Rowing Nationals

A rainy spring turned into a shining moment for the Wayland-Weston Rowing Association. 

In a near annual experience, a team of 29 athletes competed last month at the USRowing Youth National Championships in Sarasota, Florida. The team qualified eight boats at the nation’s most prestigious youth regatta, which draws top crews from spring qualifiers. More than 5,000 rowers competed as the event celebrated its 30th year. 

Wayland-Weston traditionally qualifies through the Northeast Regional, but the event was cancelled due to the spring’s wet weather and dangerous water conditions. Instead, coaches submitted other race results and members of the Youth National Championships Coaches Council from USRowing selected crews based on levels of competition both in-region and across regions, according to coach Beatrice Sims. 

The highlight of the competition in Sarasota happened when Thomas Lee of Weston and recent Wayland High graduate Alexander Dremov teamed up to finish third in the Men’s Youth Pair division. The pair raced at Nationals for the third time, and Dremov said competing there never gets old. 

“It’s certainly a shock,” Dremov said in an email to the Daily News, “and though it’s the same place, same race, same environment, and same competition, touching down at the course is certainly a crazy feeling every year.” 

Dremov, headed to Tufts University in the fall, added that placing in the top three represented a goal that was set earlier in his high school career. 

“We have had our sights set on the podium for years now,” he said. “It was kind of a silly dream at first, but when we got faster and faster and showed strong potential, we realized that anything was a possibility. I personally decided that I would do anything I could to earn a medal in the winter of my sophomore year, when I started to take the sport more seriously as a whole and saw rapid improvements in fitness and technique.” 

W-W had one other top 20 finish when Celia Balbale, Lexi Roman, Grace Zeng, and Anna Sopcik placed 19^th in the Women’s U17 Four. Also competing were: Emily Genis and Thanai Papageorgiou (Women’s Pair); Jacob Zeng, Tony Ohanian, Andrew Cui, and Felix Kissell (Men’s Four); Ethan Chen (Men’s U17 Single); Karina Andersson and Katelyn Spilman (Women’s U17 Double); Joshua Alford, Kevin Wang, Luke Furlong, Maxwell Glynn, Rishi Vaddi, Michael Sophocles, Kyle Xu, Evan Shi, and Alexander Wang (Men’s U18 Eight); and Ricky Pomianek, Elias Kano, Samuel Katz, Oliver Kivisto, and Sloan Berry (Men’s U17 Four with coxswain). 

The team was coached by Sims, a member of Brown University's 2011 NCAA champion squad who was a softball player at Grafton High School. 

“Each year's WW Nationals squad returns from the trip even more motivated than they were when they left,” Sims said, “and having a mix of older and younger athletes on the trip this year will certainly raise the team's level or competition.” 

Dremov is counting on a promising future for a program that has sent at least one boat to Nationals every year since 2006 (except 2020, when the regatta was cancelled because of COVID). 

“I can’t say if our placement will boost future WW results now that we’ve graduated,” he said, “but I can for certain say that there is a group of up and coming guys in the grades below who have the potential to fill our shoes - maybe even to surpass us.” 

Tim Dumas is a multimedia journalist for the Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Instagram at tdumas1. 

This article originally appeared on MetroWest Daily News: Nearly 30 Wayland-Weston rowers compete at Youth Rowing Nationals