Minerva nurtures another winner

8th July, 2019

Our Men’s 4+ may have missed out on the Brittania Cup at Henley Royal last week, but we had a surprise piece of good news in the not insignificant shape of Jens Hullah, formerly of this parish!
Jens was in the 2-seat of the Molesey Boat Club 4+ and became Henley Champion.

A former Beechen Cliff and then Minerva Junior, Jens left just last year but had already made his mark on much of the junior racing calendar. It’s been a hard week of celebrations, but Jens found time to send through some information on the past year:

I moved to Molesey in September 2018. It was a pretty random decision that I made over the course of about 2 weeks in August as I knew I wanted to go to uni but still wasn’t sure where. Some of us at Bath went to a camp at Bisham Abbey / Caversham, where I met a good set of new friends, two of them being from Molesey Boat Club, on the Thames, who suggested a gap year at the club.

I didn’t hesitate and emailed my current coach Stu and the club Captain with a recommendation from my friends. The club was very welcoming and seemed interested, so from day one it was great to be at a club, where I knew I would be valued just as much as I was at Minerva, which made the move so much easier.

Our crew had a few ups and downs: we got put together at our training camp in May, where originally our plan was to focus on the Thames Cup 8. I had only started learning sweep in January, so it was only in the April/May time I was getting noticed. After I won at Ghent Regatta in the coxed boat, it gave me huge confidence going into camp and I had also caught the eye of my coach Stuart Whitelaw, who started putting me in the top end boats.

The 4+ that won Henley was the fastest combination tried, especially in a coxed four.. All 4 of us had been coming top out of our seat racing on camp and so the 4+ being more of a priority than it had been. With the late arrival of our cox, Rebecca Harrison, our crew was complete at the start of June. However, quite rightly, athletes in the 8 still wanted us to stack the Thames, so there was a lot of seat racing and unknown challenges still to overcome to keep our seats. The 4+ was confirmed shortly after Marlow Regatta.

In September I will start rowing at Oxford Brookes University, where I hope to make my dream of winning this year happen again in the future, as to do it once is incredible but to do it hopefully multiple times will be a huge achievement!

I couldn’t have achieved this without you, Minerva – thank you!