The nine-member team of engineering students traveled to the Midwest for the 36th annual American Society of Civil Engineers Concrete Canoe Competition at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville last weekend
The Cal Poly concrete canoe team, the defending national champion, was the team to beat at the 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers Concrete Canoe Competition at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville on June 10-12.
It became official at the awards presentation at the end of Day Three.
“We just won our seventh national title!” said a beaming civil engineering senior Heather Migdal, the team’s project manager and one of four paddlers of Cal Poly’s canoe, Oceana.
Twenty university teams from the United States and Canada advanced to the finals from a series of ASCE regional qualifiers.
It was a dramatic defense of last year’s national victory at Louisiana Tech University. Cal Poly’s 2022 victory snapped what had been a four-way tie of five titles with UC Berkeley, the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the University of Wisconsin. The seventh win (in 13 years) of the 36th annual competition adds an exclamation mark to the title.
“This year, we’ve had our fair share of obstacles, but we’ve all come together and put in a tremendous amount of work and effort into this,” Migdal said. “The five senior captains were all on the team last year. We all know what is expected and I’m just beyond excited and happy that we’re able to say ‘We’re a two-time, national-winning team.’”
The team, which also includes Clarissa Arredondo, Aiden Buckingham, Peter Cline, Adam Loewenherz, Jonathan Maas, Sarah Sakakihara, Sarah Scherzinger, Nicholas Toma and Ryan Trainoir, won the overall title by finishing in the top three in each of the 100-point competition’s four sections. The sections include: oral presentation (30 points); technical proposal (25 points); final product prototype (25 points); and racing (20 points).
Cal Poly racked up 55 points with first-place finishes in the oral and technical presentations, second with 22.5 points in the product prototype, and second in racing (17.4 points) behind Canada’s Université Laval (18.9 points), which finished fourth overall in the competition. Youngstown State University ultimately finished second, the University of Florida was third and Western Kentucky University came in fifth.
There were plenty of ups and down for Cal Poly.
Not happy with an earlier third-place finish in the oral presentation part of the competition at the Pacific Southwest Regionals, Migdal credited some last-minute changes to the team’s script for the win in Plateville, located west of Madison, the Dairy State’s capital.
“We talked to some alumni and they gave us some pointers on how to change up the presentation and so, between regionals and nationals, we edited our script — quite heavily actually,” she said. “We were confident that we made the right changes. When we did the speech portion, we hit all of our marks. It was probably the cleanest time we had ever practiced it.”
Migdal said the Q&A part of the presentation was a noteworthy highlight.
“We were able to answer the exact questions the judges were asking and really demonstrated how invested we are in our canoe,” she said.
But even that was not without drama.
Cal Poly had to sit through more than seven hours of presentations that began at 8 a.m. on Sunday in the university’s 500-seat Brodbeck Concert Hall seats. “We were like the second to last one to go on,” said the Cupertino, California, resident. “So that was definitely some added pressure, but also just the round of applause that we got afterwards was just so amazing.”
Conditions were equally challenging out on Blackhawk Lake, a 40-minute drive northeast of campus, on Monday’s five-event race day. Despite a number of injuries, Migdal and her slalom and sprint partner Scherzinger took first in the 200-meter sprint and second in the 200-meter slalom. Scherzinger paddled despite a sore shoulder.
On the men’s side, Cal Poly’s Toma and Buckingham were second in the slalom and third in the sprint. In the four-person 400-meter sprint race that has four 100-meter legs and three turns, the foursome battled soreness, fatigue and inclement weather to finish third.
“We just went and gave it absolutely everything we had to finish out that race,” Migdal said. “I’m just so proud of what we were able to finish. That last leg, there was lots of yells to get over the finish line — but we did it right.”
By Dennis Steers
