Satisfying Race Season for Avalon & Stone Harbor Lifeguards
Erich Wolf cheers after capturing a singles row win.
Avalon and Stone Harbor authored interesting lifeguard racing campaigns this summer. Avalon relied on veteran leadership while Stone Harbor displayed some good young talent and an inspired effort from a guard who might have been experiencing his last season.
When the waves of the season subsided, each squad had something to show.
AVALON: Tough Tandem
They have been partners, practically forever. Only the roles have changed.
Matt Wolf and Jake Enright first crossed paths several years ago, with Jake playing football for Middle Township High School and Matt serving as an assistant coach. Matt gave the orders.
Then Jake joined the crew program at Marist College in New York and when he returned to the Avalon patrol, he teamed with the former teacher to form a doubles rowing pair. And Wolf became the student.
“I remember telling him he should be lifeguarding when he was 16, but then he ended up doing more coaching of me when he got back here, because I had never ridden crew,” Matt recalls. “It's kind of funny.”
It kind of worked. Wolf and Enright have completed five seasons rowing together for the Avalon Beach Patrol. They earned third-place finishes in the South Jerseys, helping the group capture a coveted team championship two years ago. Wolf and Enright also won the Kerr Invitationals this season and placed in nearly all of their races over the past five years. It has been a prosperous pairing for Avalon's Beach Patrol. That might be ending, with Enright considering going into the Navy SEALS program.
“Jake was always a phenomenal athlete,” Wolf says. “He’s kept that up, even as he went on to be a graduate of the New York Academy of the Arts. We joke that he maxed out his education.”
Wolf and Enright played an excellent complementary role to Erich Wolf, the team's unquestioned leader for several years. While he secured points in singles rows, they provided vital points in doubles. Their exploits, as in the 2015 South Jerseys, often kept the team mathematically alive for Erich to be in a position to win for the team.
Avalon’s rowers thus paved the team’s satisfying season.
“All of them made a really nice run,” says Captain Murray Wolf, Erich’s and Matt’s father. “We came along nicely as the season developed.”
Avalon's biggest team triumph came in what the patrol considers a “must” victory, the Kerr Memorials that it hosts. For the seventh straight year, it did win, fighting off a challenge from pesky Sea Isle City to prevail. Wolf and Enright won the doubles, with Craig Whitehead and Shane McGrath second. Erich Wolf won the singles and the surf-dash relay team (Marty Caron, Greg Carr, Sean Sehn, Brendan Carne and Jeff Conboy) delivered an important victory. Avalon triumphed in come-from-behind fashion.
Erich Wolf was in top form all season long. He triumphed handily for Avalon in the Beschen-Callahan singles row. Matt Wolf and Enright took third in the doubles row, John Anthony was fourth in the rescue board and Sean Stevens prevailed in the can run. Erich Wolf continued rounding into form with the Beschen-Callahan triumph.
STONE HARBOR: A Nice Blend
Stone Harbor rode some early inspiration from veteran guard John Ruskey in what might have been his final season. Ruskey recently graduated from Rutgers with a degree in health administration and lined up a fall job at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Ruskey, the wily 22-year-old veteran and seventh-year guard, launched his final campaign with a singles-row victory in the Cape May County Championships. Rookie guard Justin McClellan, from West Chester, Pa., notched a fifth-place finish in the half-mile swim to secure his first point for the patrol. And third-year participant Chip Schroder was third in the run-swim, marking a gratifying patrol debut. The recent high-school graduate broke through this season, earning the right to represent Stone Harbor for the first time.
The patrol showed more depth at the Kerrs, with Elliot Bigler, Kieran McVan, Sam Fuchs, Kurt Kircher finishing second in the surf dash.
