Rowing for less than a year, a Western Heights High School crew have taken home silver at the Maadi Cup regatta.
The team left it until late on the last day of racing at the AON Maadi Cup to grab some silverware for Rotorua rowers.
The under-18 novice coxed quad crew (Stephen Wright, Lewis Morrell, Matthew Bennett, Connor McNamara-Spackman, Keely Gage) secured a silver medal in a time of 7m 05.52s.
They were beaten by the crew from Napier Boys' High who also won the North Island Secondary School championships earlier last month.
The WHHS crew have been rowing since May last year but were motivated for success at the Maadi regatta.
"We were hungry for a medal before we started," McNamara-Spackman said.
He said they didn't start as well as they normally did, but were still in touch when Napier Boys' High made their move early in the race and stayed with them down the 2km course.
Rotorua had 34 rowers from five secondary schools competing at Maadi which is the biggest schools regatta in the southern hemisphere and is the peak of junior rowing in New Zealand.
Head coach Alastair Riddell said all the Rotorua crews selected for this year's Maadi regatta did well although Rotorua had won more medals in previous years. "Everyone who came down here got better as the week went on. They toughened up and got faster."
Maadi alternates between Twizel and Karapiro each year and the South Island regatta is considered the harder of the two.
"Mentally it's a lot tougher down here," Riddell said. He also said the school rowing regattas were becoming more competitive.
"The top speeds rowers are doing hasn't changed, but the number of rowers doing them has," he said.
Previously several rowers would be getting top speeds but now it was all those competing in the A finals and half of the B finalists.
The girls under-16 coxed four were the John Paul College crew (Olivia Ashby, Angela O'Sullivan, Grace Eriksen, Georgina Hyde and Delaney Phillipps) who missed out on the bronze medal by just 0.14 seconds.
The race was so close there was only two boat lengths between first and eighth.
Another heartbreak for Rotorua was in the girls under-18 singles where Natalie Hill finished a very close fourth.
The race was won by rising rowing star Zoe McBride from Kavanagh College in Dunedin in a time of 8m 18.64s, well ahead of second placed Kristen Froude.
However, there is some good news for Hill. Before the regatta started she earned a trial for the New Zealand junior rowing team that will compete in Europe later this year.