PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. — Myla Chance, a junior at Jupiter Christian High School, first met rowing partner Viktoria Ekstrand from American Heritage in Delray Beach, when they were paired with each other for the state competition.
“We’re pretty short for rowers, we’re the same height, so our coach stuck us in the boat together,” Chance said.
"After we practiced it a couple of times, I feel like we realized we really clicked,” Ekstrand added.
The two rowers, from two different schools, with only two months to train swept a state competition and then pushed to the nationals.
“Nationals, we were a little nervous going in,” Chance said. “She was coming off an injury and we had no practice together at all and one of my mottos is, if you’re not practicing, someone else is.”
Ekstrand said she was training on the bike, but not in the boat after her injury and Chance said she had been training in the boat but not with her partner prior to the competition.
“We had no expectations going into it,” Chance said. “We were just like throw it all out there and don’t expect anything and just race hard. And it worked really well.”
Chance and Ekstrand took first place in the state competition and went on to win nationals.
“It felt really good,” Ekstrand said. “I don’t think I realized what actually was happening in the moment when we were done, but it was super cool.”
Emre Çıkıncı is their coach at North Palm Beach Rowing Club.
“I compete in world champs two times and took start more than 100 times international regattas,”
Born and raised in Turkey, today, he’s a volunteer coaching not just Chance and Ekstrand in North Palm Beach but kids and teens from all over with a passion for crew.
That passion is fueled by blockbuster movie “Boys in the Boat"—-a true story based on a book about a group of poor college kids who took on Ivy League rowing teams. The unlikely crew wound up winning gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
“I’ve seen the movie three times so far, in three weeks,” Çıkıncı said.
North Palm Beach Rowing Club founder and longtime fundraiser Jock Miriam expects the movie to give the sport a boost.
“We started off on a shoestring, literally one or two boats,” he said. “We’ve had kids, as many as 1,300 kids, from schools plus homeschool. One season they come to us, because we are the only rowing club through any of the schools here.”
Beth Eisleman rows with Miriam. The two-person crew, both in their 70s, are still competing on the world’s stage. They have a message to local seniors about the sport, which welcomes all ages.
“The hope is with this movie, people become more aware that it’s here in Florida and open and available to them,” Eisleman said.
Forty miles west in Wellington, rowing is available there too.
Howard and Tracy Kirkpatrick run the Florida Rowing Center and said since the movie, they’re seeing new interest in their youth programs.
“It promotes it so much and it glamorizes it, which is always helpful,” Tracy Kirkpatrick said.
“It’s interesting. Before you’d have to explain, people would say, ‘Oh is that like kayaking?’ And now, everyone knows what rowing is,” Howard Kirkpatrick said.
It’s the grit and fortitude of the eight boys in the film that Chance and Ekstrand understand.
“It shows that practicing day and night pushing themselves, putting themselves through that pain and make it all worth it,” Chance said. “It was great, and it was really relatable.”
“Especially to see that they were novices and they had something to work for,” Ekstrand added.
Chance and Ekstrand both have goals of one day rowing in the Olympics.
Meanwhile, the North Palm Beach Rowing Club came home with five state championships in various categories after a regatta last weekend on Florida’s west coast. The organization is currenlty raising money to build a row house to help athletes reach peak performance.