CLEVELAND — The Head of Cuyahoga Regatta Race was held Saturday in Cleveland.

Regan Macerollo, who raced in the regatta, is a third-year student at Ohio State University and is on their club rowing team. She explained what her favorite part of being on the team is. 

 

What You Need To Know

  • Head of the Cuyahoga has happened on the Cuyahoga River for 25 years 

  • The river used to be extremely polluted, but the water quality has increased significantly 

  • Teams from 15 different states came to compete 
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“I really love the team environment. I think we’ve built a really good community, almost like a family. I mean even though we’re together every morning for practice, we’re also together almost every night or during the school day working on homework and just hanging out,” she said. 

It was her team’s first race this year and she wanted them to focus on working as a team and see what the flow was like in the boat. 

“This is our team’s first race of the season and I think that’s the same for a lot of the teams here and so I don’t think we have very strict goals for ourselves more than to just get a race under our belts before we move on to some bigger regattas this season and really just see how our boat is moving,” she said. 

The Cuyahoga River was previously very polluted, but the quality of water has become much better over the years, making it possible to have races like these on the river.

Macerollo said rowers think about water quality during a race. 

“It definitely does impact the way that you can row if a river is super-polluted, especially like large pieces of trash will get stuck on your oar which is never fun. So definitely working as a community to clean up the rivers does improve the sport overall and is something that every team can work on,” she said. 

Teams from 15 different states came to Cleveland to compete on a course that was a little over three miles long.