Getting to Know the Niagara Falls Rowing Club
To honour the history, dedication and current initiatives of each rowing community, Row Ontario will be producing a series of profiles on member clubs across Ontario. Today we get to know more about the Niagara Falls Rowing Club!
Niagara Falls Rowing Club
Established: 2014
Location: Niagara Falls, Ont.
https://niagarafallsrowingclub.com/
Establishing a rowing club in Niagara Falls had been discussed for many years. With a rich history in rowing, the Niagara region, including St. Catharines, Welland, and other surrounding communities, had several rowing clubs but none were located in Niagara Falls. Several high schools in town had been running rowing programs for many years but the students and other rowing enthusiasts in the city had to go out of town to row.
The Niagara Falls Rowing Club was officially incorporated in 2014, making it one of the newest rowing clubs in Ontario. While it was formally established in 2014, the seeds of the club were planted two years earlier. Tony Arcuri and Wernher Verbraeken, two long-time rowers who were heavily involved in the Niagara Falls high school rowing scene, started the club unofficially in 2012 with a small group of high school rowers.
“There was somewhere between 50-70 high school students rowing in Niagara Falls each year before we started the club,” said Arcuri. “Both Wernher and I were really involved in high school rowing, so we decided to initiate a club in Niagara Falls. It started out of Wernher’s backyard. He lived on Lyons Creek which fed into the Welland River. So, we put a little dock in his backyard, bought a few small boats, invited a handful of kids and unofficially started a rowing club in his backyard.”
A group of ten rowers in 2012 expanded to 24 in 2013. A few more boats were generously donated and modifications to the dock were made to house the larger group of athletes. After successfully running the program for two years, Arcuri and Verbraeken had a base of rowers and enough demand that the next logical step was to formally establish the club in 2014. Arcuri was installed as the club’s first President while Verbraeken was named the first Vice President. Membership grew to over 60 in 2014 and the dock was again expanded to make launching and docking easier and faster. The fleet was also expanded to include three four-person rowing shells.
With the club growing fast, they needed to move to a more permanent location. With the help of the City of Niagara Falls, plans were put in place by the end of the summer in 2015 to move to George Bukator Park on the shores of the Chippawa Creek. The waterway on the Creek is well suited for rowing, with the water typically flowing east bound except for when the nearby hydro station changes the direction of the water.
“The waterway is a little bit unique because it comes right off the Niagara River,” said Justin Gauthier, the club’s current President. “There’s a hydro station intake close by and at times there can be a significant current. So, whether you’re going with it or against it the rowers need to adapt. The direction of the current changes on what the hydro intake is doing. So, knowing the water and what it is doing each day is very important to understand how your row will go.”
The club has about 7km each way to row on, giving them lots of room to explore the waterway. They typically row from March to November and even try to get out during the winter at least once or twice per month for fun rows. They have also established a New Year’s Day row that has become part of the club tradition. In 2016, the NFRC completed construction on a new two-bay boathouse at their new location which was a huge improvement for the infrastructure of the club. After competing in a few smaller regattas in 2015, the club entered its first major regattas in 2016 as well, competing in their first Royal Canadian Henley Regatta and Head of the Charles. They also reached the podium in regattas held in Welland, St. Catharines and London, a sign of how far the club had progressed in just a few years in operation. They have continued to compete in the Ontario regatta circuit each year as well as a several regattas in the U.S. including races in Buffalo and Rochester and a high school regatta in Philadelphia.
The solid high school programming the club has developed in just a few years has paid dividends to its athletes. Several alumni of the club’s high school program have gone on to compete on Canadian and U.S. university teams, including Verbraeken’s daughter Katerina who earned a scholarship to Nova Southeastern University in Florida in 2017. Gauthier’s son Payton has also been making a name for himself in recent years, joining the Ontario NextGen Performance Centre in 2020 and competing at the 2021 World Rowing Junior Championships in Bulgaria in August.
“We’re starting to see more rowers develop their skills and move on to the next level and that’s really satisfying as a club,” said Arcuri. “And then to have them come back and give back to the club as volunteers and coaches is also really cool. We’re starting to see more of that as the club grows.”
After starting out with primarily high school-aged students as members of the club, the NFRC has also worked hard to develop more programming in the last several years to serve the entire rowing population in Niagara Falls.
“We always run a spring high school program, which then feeds into our club competitive program in the summer,” said Arcuri. “We’ve also introduced adult recreational rowing and masters rowing in the spring, summer and fall, and we’re trying to build up the youth program as well. We’ve had a lot of interest in the youth program, and we hope that will continue to feed the high school and junior programs at the club. We’re really trying to open it up to the community, anyone who wants to do some exercise and come out and row is welcome.”
Long-time members Jane and Jim Hyman are primarily responsible for the growth of the club’s masters and recreational programs and have also been very active as volunteers since the inception of the club. They are part of a dedicated group of volunteers who not only organize the club’s programming but run fundraisers such as their annual ‘Stag and Rows’ and selling of boxes of meat to the community, as well as their annual Holiday party and new boat and equipment christening, which usually take place in August or September.
While most of the club’s members typically come from Niagara Falls, they do draw from other communities such as Fort Erie, Crystal Beach, Stevensville, Niagara-on-the-Lake and Thorold. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic the club’s membership has continued to increase, a good sign for the future of the club and for the popularity of rowing in the area. After just seven years in ‘official’ operation, the Niagara Falls Rowing Club has become a part of the local community and show no signs of slowing down in the future.
“The club is really becoming a big part of the community, especially in Chippawa which is a small community,” said Gauthier. “Eventually we’d like to host a regatta in the area. Our boats are out there every day and I think people in town enjoy seeing the rowers go by.”
Thank you to Tony Arcuri and Justin Gauthier for their generous contributions and help in completing this profile. Photos are property of the Niagara Falls Rowing Club.
