Youth Quads Prove Popular at ‘The Hooch’

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.”

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