After a stinging defeat Saturday on the football field, Virginia fans may be looking for good news. The women’s rowing team looks to have provided some.
A year ago, Virginia’s top eight lost the Princeton Chase to the Tigers by 0.871 seconds. On Sunday, the Cavaliers returned to Lake Carnegie on a mission and left no doubt.
Virginia swept both women’s events it entered at the 2026 Princeton Chase, winning the 67-boat Women’s Open Eight in 13:31.211 and the 43-boat Women’s Four in 15:31.941. Princeton finished
second in both. The three-mile head race on Princeton’s home water is the final fall stop for much of the East Coast’s college rowing, and this year it drew 22 programs, including Rutgers, Penn, Oklahoma and Clemson.
It capped a fall that could hardly have gone better for Wes Ng’s program.
Settling the score on Lake Carnegie
Princeton had the home course and was the defending champion. In 2025, the Tigers’ top eight held off Virginia by less than a second, 13:56.055 to 13:56.926, with Virginia’s second eight in third.
This time it wasn’t close. Virginia’s top eight beat Princeton’s by 5.668 seconds, a swing of more than six seconds from a year ago. Rutgers took third, 27.6 seconds back, and no other program’s top boat finished within 48 seconds of the Cavaliers. Penn was eighth and Oklahoma ninth.
Virginia’s depth showed too. Its second eight finished fourth in 14:07.216, ahead of Princeton’s second boat by 3.5 seconds and ahead of the top boats from every program except Princeton and Rutgers.
The four was a title defense, and Princeton made Virginia earn it. Virginia’s top four won by 13.4 seconds last fall. On Sunday, it held off Princeton’s top four by 1.677 seconds. Behind them, Virginia’s second four finished third, 18.4 seconds back and ahead of Princeton’s B boat, and its third four was fifth. That put three Virginia boats in the top five. Its fourth boat finished 11th, ahead of the top fours from Clemson, Oklahoma and Iowa. Penn’s top four, which won the championship four at the Head of the Charles, finished seventh, 47.4 seconds behind Virginia.
In all, Virginia’s six boats finished first and fourth in the eights and first, third, fifth and 11th in the fours.
Two-for-two this fall
Two weeks ago at the Head of the Charles, Virginia’s top eight finished third in the Women’s Championship Eights in 15:02.791, behind only the two USRowing Training Center boats stocked with post-collegiate national team hopefuls. That time broke the course record for a college crew in the event, set by Washington (15:03.829) in 2017, and put Virginia ahead of every other college in the 32-boat field, including Princeton, Yale, Brown, Oxford and Cambridge.
Sunday showed that result was no one-off. Virginia has now beaten Princeton, which finished sixth at NCAAs last spring, twice in two weeks, on two very different courses, the second time on the Tigers’ home water.
The trajectory keeps pointing up
None of this came out of nowhere. In Ng’s first season, Virginia finished 10th at the NCAA Championships. Last May at Lake Lanier, it finished fourth, its best national finish since 2016, with all three scoring boats reaching the grand final. The Cavaliers were five points off the podium.
Now Ng is in year three, and his top boat has been the fastest college crew in both of its fall races. The usual caveats apply. Fall head races are three miles, not 2,000 meters, and lineups will change before May. Texas, Stanford and Tennessee, the three teams that finished ahead of Virginia at NCAAs, raced neither event. But a program can only beat the crews that show up, and this fall Virginia has beaten every college crew it has raced.
A bright spot in a tough fall
The rest of Virginia’s fall has not gone this way. A year after winning a program-record 11 games, football started 2-0 and ranked, then lost 51-7 at Wake Forest on Saturday for its third straight loss. At 4-5, it needs two wins in its last three games just to reach a bowl. Men’s soccer, a No. 2 national seed last year, opened this season ranked No. 11 and fell out of the polls by October. Field hockey, picked second in the ACC, slid down the rankings as the losses piled up. Last fall, Virginia sat third in the fall Directors’ Cup standings. It won’t be close to that this year.
Rowing has gone the other way. In my fall sports roundup last month, I named women’s swimming and diving and men’s tennis as Virginia’s best shots at a national title this year. After the Head of the Charles, I added rowing as a possible third. After Sunday’s results, that case has only gotten stronger.
