Rutgers women’s rowing earned an 11th-place finish at the NCAA Championships this past weekend down at Lake Lanier Olympic Park in Gainesville, Georgia. The Scarlet Knights, who were looking for their best-ever finish at the NCAA championships, fell three ranks short of tying the program’s best of an 8th-place finish.
Texas won the 2026 NCAA Championship with 130 points, followed by Stanford with 125 points and Tennessee with 119 points. RU accumulated 75 points in its 11th-place finish, being only
two points shy of earning a top 10 finish.
Rutgers’ Varsity 4 captured fourth in the Grand Final, which matched the highest finish ever for a Rutgers boat at the NCAA Championships.
Rutgers’ Second Varsity 8 won the C final for a second straight season, cruising to a 7.754-second margin of victory over second-place Columbia. Taking first in the C final earned the second varsity 8 squad a 13th-place finish in their block.
Rutgers wrapped up the championship with the Varsity 8 taking fifth in the petite final to finish 11th overall, after coming in just two seconds behind Brown. Brown’s victory over the Knights in this race held them just out of the top 10 as the Bears secured 10th place by two points.
While placing 11th out of 22 teams is a decent all-around performance, it is the team’s seventh consecutive NCAA championship appearance under head coach Justin Price, and the fact that the team barely missed out on a Big Ten Championship after losing a close battle with Washington means that the competitors were looking for a lot more in this competition. While the results of this current run were underwhelming, there is little reason to doubt that more accolades will come in the near future for one of the most consistent programs at Rutgers.
Now, Rutgers women’s rowing will look ahead to next year’s competition as the 2025-2026 athletics year comes to a close.
