Sunflower State Championship Regatta to be held at Tuttle Creek

At 1 p.m. Saturday, there will be another opportunity for K-State to best Kansas, and also Wichita State. The rowing club teams will compete in the Sunflower State Championship Regatta, which rotates between the three schools. It will be a 2,000-meter home event this spring, just a short drive away from campus at Tuttle Creek Lake.

Since there are only three teams, the combination of seven-minute-long races by men's and women's four-person and eight-person boats at both the novice and varsity levels is expected to wrap up around 3 or 4 p.m.

"Our expectations are very high," said rower Scott Steffen. "We had a good showing last fall, and we are hoping to really carry that well over into the spring, so we see ourselves quite possibly winning it and doing very well."

Novice coach Craig Doan said that in the fall the team defeated some top-ranked teams and said he thinks if K-State had a little bit bigger crew with some more publicity, it might be in the top 10 itself.

He said K-State boats placed third and sixth in nationals two years ago, and Steffen recounted a story of a K-State novice boat placing third in a race with varsity boats, which they were put into because of a scheduling conflict.

"A novice boat beating varsity boats — that's pretty awesome," Steffen said.

Doan said rowing can be a spectator sport, but a little knowledge is necessary because the races can be a bit dull in the middle since the starts and finishes are the most obviously exciting.

"I think it's a sport that you can support if you understand it's a lot like baseball where you have to know what's going on and have an understanding," Doan said. "Because if you do, every pitch is exciting, every swing, things like that."

In the boathouse, one of the boats is named for Don Rose, who started K-State's rowing club back in 1963, when the nearest boathouse was 500 miles away, and effectively began the sport in the Midwest. The programs of WSU and KU came after K-State's did.

Varsity coach Brian Ransom said the team is fairly young this season. All but a couple of the rowers have only been in the sport for over a year.

Ransom said good rowers have really strong catches, good hard drives and nice long recoveries so they can breathe.

"The older, more experienced rowers basically just look like machines or pistons," Ransom said.