Rowing: Trappitt earns seat in NZ's elite team

Lousie Trappitt will be joining Rebecca Scown in the Women's Coxless pair. 2014 New Zealand Rowing Team selected with focus on Olympic boats. Photo / Christine Cornege.

Louise Trappitt doesn't need anyone telling her she's got one of the more challenging jobs in this year's New Zealand elite rowing team.

She's won a seat in the coxless pair alongside Rebecca Scown for this year's international campaign, culminating in the world championships in Amsterdam next August.

In 2012 Scown and the now-retired Juliette Haigh won bronze at the London Olympics; last year Scown and Kayla Pratt won silvers at two world cups and bronze at the world champs in South Korea in August.

Now Trappitt has displaced Pratt and joins Scown in a well-performed boat where the expectations are high.

"I've got to rise to the challenge," the 28-year-old Dunedin-born, Wellington-raised Trappitt said.

"I need to exceed my expectations of myself and keep improving, lift myself up to that high standard."

Trappitt, who won a world champs bronze in the quad in 2011, and competed at the London Olympics, took last year off, although finished up in a reserve role midway through the year.

Summer was spent in Blenheim working at a winery but now she's back and "looking forward to being back in the team in this environment".

Trappitt teamed up with Scown for the Central RPC squad to win the pair at the national championships at Lake Karapiro last month. That didn't hurt her chances.

"We set a New Zealand record there. It was a prety tough week for us but they (national selectors) must have taken what they saw at the nationals as a good sign and had faith in that and decided to roll with it."

Now it's time for her to sit down with Scown and coach Gary Hay and work out strategies for the year.

They will contest all three World Cups - Sydney at the end of this month, Aiguebelette, France in June, and at Lucerne, Switzerland the following month, before going to Amsterdam.

"We'll have to find something that will bring us up to the next level.

"We've got pretty stiff competition with the Great Britain girls (Helen Glover and Polly Swann) won all three world cups and the world champs last year) so we've really got to find something that's going to set us flying."

Trappitt has a PE degree from Otago University and has been doing post-grad studies in rehabilitation extra murally through Otago. As she put it "I did it the wrong way round".

"I wasn't very good at rowing for a long time so I did the university thing first."

Now it's full steam ahead with her rowing this year, with the ambition of moving New Zealand up the rankings in a competitive discipline.