Renton Rowing Center offers aquatic teamwork on Lake Washington

When adventuring down to Cedar River Trail Park at the southern tip of Lake Washington, with the Renton Airport on one side and Boeing on the other, it’s easy to overlook the signs for it, but they are there — at the very end of the Cedar River Trail is the Renton Rowing Center, where anyone interested in rowing, dragon boating or even just renting a kayak or paddleboard for the day can find some aquatic recreation.

”It’s just a way for people to get out on the water. There’s really not a lot of other opportunities to rent kayaks around here,” said RRC Executive Director Rachel Wong. “Lots of folks own their own watercraft but, as far as I know, we’re the only place like this at this end of the lake that has public access.”

At the very end of the pier is the RRC boathouse, filled with boats, paddles, rowing machines and even an upstairs gym with weights and space for dynamic stretching. With around 45 youth members and close to 55 adult members, rowing is a sport that is accessible to a wide range of age groups, thanks to it being a very low impact way to exercise.

“Two-thousand meters is the standard sprint race distance in rowing, so they say that racing a 2,000-meter sprint race, in terms of the cardiovascular output, is akin to playing two back-to-back basketball games,” said Wong, who was inspired to start dragon boating by her grandmother — who was on a senior team for people 60 years of age and up. When Wong enrolled in Seattle University, she began rowing and has not stopped since.

The club offers memberships, discounts, punch cards and a four-week rowing course for anyone joining that club that does not have prior collegiate rowing experience.

Unlike paddling a canoe or splashing around in a rented kayak, rowing is a racing sport where the oars are attached to the boats, which are long and slim like a heron. Rowing teams can range from a lone rower through a team of five, or even a team of nine. When a rowing team is sculling, each rower holds two oars. When sweep rowing, each rower is assigned one oar. Many rowing teams will have a coxswain, who does not use an oar, but will sit at the bow of the boat and lead the direction using a special pulley system.

The first RRC rower to qualify for the U.S. Rowing Youth National Championships in 2023 was Isabelle “Izzy” Teal, who is now a sophomore on the rowing team at Seattle University.

Teal still returns to the RRC boathouse during breaks and on the weekends with her rowing partner Kai Powers to row up and down Lake Washington. The two rowed together when they went to Liberty High School, and recently, Powers went to the most recent Youth National Championships in June 2024.

While local schools do not have rowing teams, the club’s youth members make their way to the pier, thanks to RRC being the only program on Lake Washington that begins at 6th grade.

“Most boathouses in the area will have a youth program, but most of them are high school only, which is hard just because, especially these days, it feels like kids are starting to find their sport earlier and earlier. So if they haven’t found rowing by high school, they might have already figured something else out,” said Wong. “So it’s nice to expose kids to it early and rowing is also a great cross-training sport in the Northwest because our lake doesn’t freeze over.”

With Lake Washington never freezing over, the club is able to operate year-round, though the fall season is the longest for them, with youth teams arriving right after school gets out and the adult teams practicing in the evenings. Since operating independently, the RRC has grown, but they still need assistance in keeping up with the center’s structural needs

Lindbergh High School teacher and chair of the RRC Board of Directors Kent McCleary spoke at the Dec. 9 Renton City Council meeting, seeking grants so that the RRC could replace their old wooden dock with a longer-lasting metal dock.

“It’s wood, so it has a lifespan and it’s starting to degrade a little bit, and we frequently have to change the planks out and the at some point down the road, if we don’t replace it, the flotation will start to fail as well,” said Wong a few weeks later. “A new dock will run us, we’ve estimated, probably about half a million (dollars), which as a small nonprofit organization, we don’t have laying around.”

For more information on Renton Rowing Club membership, kayak rentals and more, visit rentonrowingcenter.org.