R.U.R.C win 2011/2012 Club of the Year at Sport Roehampton Awards

On a magical night on Froebel campus, Roehampton University Rowing Club walked away with the prestigious 'Club of the Year' award from the 2011/2012 Sport Roehampton Awards. The award recognises the giant strides made by the club this year in terms of it's organisation, it's structure, it's membership levels and it's equipment, all of which will hopefully provide the basis for 2012/2013 to be R.U.R.C's breakthrough year from a performance perspective. 

A massive well done to all of our members in 2011/2012 - here's hoping for another successful season next year :)

R.U.R.C collecting their award

Club Captain Sam Sears proudly showing off our award

This year's brilliant committee (minus Sam Kirby and Eirik Christiansen)

TOUR!!!!

See below an overview of R.U.R.C's time on Tour this year from Social Sec Rachel Esker!

"On the 9th of April the biggest social event of the rowing calendar had begun, Salou Tour 2012. It had been a lot of hard work organising coaches as unfortunately the rowing team had been split up into three groups all on different ones! After a 28hour coach journey we all made it to Salou in one piece.


On arrival we joined the 9 boys who had been travelling with the university of Kent at the pub the Rio Grande which would become our regular for the week, and had our first drinks in Salou!
As we headed into the evening on the first night the theme was wedding, as you can see from the pictures some of our lovely rowing boys looked amazing in their dresses! (Ian Esplin in particular with his rather fetching wig!) With the use of the R.U.R.C beer bong getting significant use over that night and the rest of the week. The whole team ended the night in one of the main clubs Kiss, and was a fantastic but blurry start to the tour!


The Next morning was beach day! 
With the weather being nice we decided to have some games which involved a relay race and a dive into the sea 3 times. As you guess with this being a social event there was GIN involved. We then started our next game in two teams, dig your own rowing boat with all the trimmings in the sand! That’s right the space for the cox, riggars, oars and amongst other parts such as the bow ball! Thank you to all the seniors who made the events of the beach day run smoothly.

As we progressed into the evening the theme for the second night was pirates, tonight I was glad that Sam Sears was about for help with the pre drinking events he was a huge help! Again we played numerous games and endedup in a club called Snoopies which I can safely say we did not leave until about 5.30 in the morning.
The Thursday unfortunately we had some rain throughout the day, so we decided as a team to go out for dinner, the whole 28 of us went to our favourite little pub once more, the Rio Grande. Numerous pints were drunk and we all had some good food! The evening events that night were Greek and Roman style with everyone dressing up in Toga’s, and we even had Gladiators, Medusa and a Minotaur! It was the night where we allowed a senior fresher switch. This meant that for one hour the fresher’s were in charge of the whole senior team. Much to our dislike we had to eat cat biscuits that were covered in vodka and sambuca. Little did they know it was going to be turned around the next day! We headed to Pacha that night, where we saw so epic pole dancing from Mike Benson. 

The Friday we had an early start as we had a booze cruise that set sail at 10.30am! So we all dragged our self’s out of bed and headed down to the beach to catch our boat.
Being dressed in our R.U.R.C hoodies was an experience that many people had ever experienced on a booze cruise before as normally it’s the weather for bikinis and shorts. But despite the cold weather Amy day continually danced away in her bikini! It may have helped that we had a three hour free bar which was supplying us endless amounts of sangria and beer. A few of our lads were the first into the water when we stopped the boat! Which was then followed by some of our more daring girls. Some even got a trip out in a rib boat out into the sea which they all enjoyed.
Friday was our final night on tour, where our team all wore our tour tops which we were all given individual comical names, some more embarrassing than others! We had a few games for the fresher’s as pay back for the events of last night, a sausage with cheese in the middle with wiped cream comes to mind… We left about 1.30am after all the games and fun and when all the booze had run dry. R.U.R.C ended up in both kiss and snoopies with many of us not sleeping as our check out time 7am! And congratulations to Jeppe who got named our Tour hero for 2012!


I would like say a big thank you to Sam Sears for his help throughout the evenings. Along with Sarah Fort and Richard Swoboda on the last night and everyone who came to help carry with drinks! The fresher’s for being such good sports with everything that we did. Amy Austen for sitting through the meetings with me. Thank you for our lovely gifts that myself, Amy and Sam received on the last night. And as ever we missed our other Social Sec, Sam Kirby as you can see from all the pictures he was around through out the week even if it was only a cardboard version of himself! We said a goodbye to our third years who will not be joining us on next years tour who each and everyone of them will be missed!
It was a pleasure being your social sec on tour and I loved every minute of it! No doubt we will be doing it all again next year!

Rachel!
xxxxx"

Last Week of Term

Sadly, this week has been officially the last week of the 2011/2012 rowing season. That is not to say, Roehampton University Rowing Club will not continue to train and compete over the summer! Be sure to keep checking back for updates about our performance at this summer's regattas.

The main event this week was the unveiling of he names of two of our fleet of boats. The first, our club single scull, has been named LAURA after our coach during the 2010/2011 season, Laura Fisher, who really helped start the club on our current upward curve. See below for a photo!

The second boat, our club quad/four, previously named Kees Van Daam, has been re-named David Bedford. This is in recognition of Dave's (a current 3rd year) commitment to the club over his time with R.U.R.C. See below for a photo of Dave with his new boat.

The other big event at the club this week was our first ever annual Inter-Club Head Race Championships, where our crews raced against each other to be the best at Roehampton. I'm pleased to say the races were a success, and congratulations to all of the winners! Trophies and medals will be given out at our end of year meal in May.

THE BEACON

2 New Boats, a New Sponsor, a 'ROCK' Social and the Head of the River = 1 Very Eventful Week!

The clue is in the title - this has certainly been one of Roehampton University Rowing Club's busiest weeks EVER! The first big news of the week came in the form of Men's Squad member Jeppe Fensholt approaching us about the possibility of his dad's company becoming our new sponsor. We obviously thought long and hard about this (not too long though!) and graciously accepted. As such we are pleased to announce that our new sponsor for the coming season will be Murmester Fensholt & Sons A/S of Oslo, Norway. They kindly donated £600 to add to the money from our massively successful London to Brighton bike ride fundraiser, thus allowing us to purchase our new 1987 Empacher VIII from our neighbours Quintin Boat Club! That means that overall our fundraising efforts raised not only the £2000 needed to buy the boat, but we still have a good amount of money left over to hopefully purchase a CoxBox. What an achievement! We collected our new boat on Friday morning, and used it for a short session with our newly painted oars before using them both in anger for the first time at Saturday's Head of the River, but more on that later! The VIII has been coded as ROE018 in recognition of the 18 people who started and completed the bike ride, and has been named THE BEACON after the famously steep hill just before Brighton on the ride's route. We'll be sure to add some close up shots of the boat later this week, but for the meantime try and spot it in our HORR pictures below! Massive thanks again to everyone that donated to our fundraiser, our new sponsor, and also Mark Chatwin and Alex Page at Quintin for helping us out with the purchase.

A sticker carrying this logo will be added to THE BEACON very soon as part of our new sponsorship arrangement

Not content with purchasing one new boat last week, R.U.R.C also had a hand in purchasing another. Men's Captain Sam Neal, Treasurer/Fundraiser Diana Lava and Hannu Hara have chipped in together, with a contribution from Sport Roehampton, to purchase a single scull. The idea being the 3 private owners can use it at their leisure for their own training whilst it can be used by other club members at R.U.R.C sessions. We think this will be massively useful going forward. The boat is a 10(?) year old Burgashell Super Carbon purchased from Monmouth Rowing Club in Wales. It was kindly delivered to us on Saturday as Monmouth too were competing this weekend, and was rowed back to TTRC by Club Captain Sam Sears, who had an amazing time in it apparently! The boat has been given the ID ROE101, and has yet to be named. Check out below for a pic of the new boat, and also a pic of the Croker oars which came with it.

R.U.R.C's new single!

Wednesday night saw our latest social, this one being 'ROCK' themed - think KISS, Black Sabbath etc. Safe to say, as always with R.U.R.C the night was not only brilliantly attended but also massively enjoyable. Thanks again to Rachel Esker and Sam Kirby for being so dedicated to getting our rowers drunken and disorderly! Think the below photo sums up the evening nicely!

Amy, Rachel and Sarah at last week's 'ROCK' social.

And so onto the weekend, and the biggest race of the head season - HEAD OF THE RIVER. Roehampton University Rowing Club entered 2 crews into this years event, which is a massive achievement in itself when last year we were struggling to put together 1! The boys in both crews did us proud, and despite a few set-backs in the preceding week, each crew put in a performance we are all happy with. Our 1st VIII came home 381st overall, 54th out of 64 in their category, in a time of 22:03 which despite worse conditions was quicker than last year! Our 2nd VIII came 394th overall in a time of 24:04 which is comparable to last years crew, and in itself is a massive achievement. See below for a few selected pictures of the boys.

Men's 2nd VIII - Toby Ballentyne, Antonis Mavrommattis, Mike Benson, Diana Lava (Cox), Ryan Livingstone, Tom Sykes-Brown, Reece Pawsey and Ben Thompson. (Matt Dodd not pictured)

Both crews!

Men's 1st VIII - Sam Neal, Jeppe Fensholt, Jan Erik Haavik, Sam Sears, Amy Austen (Cox), Richard Swoboda, Mike Bretton, David Bedford and Hannu Hara