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Combs will oversee all aspects of the girls youth team, including training, development, recruiting, race preparation and lineups for upcoming regattas.
Along with his colleague Yuri Kolomiets, the head boys coach for NRRA, he will be responsible for continuing to help the club’s youth program grow and succeed through the fall head race season, the spring sprint season and the summertime regattas.
Combs is a former standout collegiate rower with 10 years of coaching experience in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Florida.
“NRRA prides itself not only on regularly sending a competitive team to important regattas such the Youth National Championships and the Royal Canadian Henley Regatta, but also to providing an enriching program of teamwork, training and competition for every athlete on our teams.,'' said Robin Roscillo, Norwalk River Rowing Association’s executive director. "In Andrew Combs, we believe we have found the ideal coach to help us continue and expand on that.”
In addition to its successes at Youth Nationals, Club National Championships and the Royal Canadian Henley, NRRA also sent two rowers to the Youth World Championships in Rio de Janeiro this month.
For Coach Combs, who grew up in Litchfield, the position at Norwalk River Rowing means a return to his home state.
Most recently, he was the 2014-2015 varsity girls coach for the Sarasota Crew club, in Sarasota, Fla. His team won the overall points championship in the Southeast Regional Championships, and gold medals in the Varsity 8 and Lightweight 8. Sarasota’s Varsity 8, Lightweight 8 and Varsity 4 competed in Youth Nationals, and the Varsity 8 and Varsity 4 both finished 18th in the Head of the Charles Regatta.
Before Sarasota, Coach Combs was the head women’s novice coach at the University of Buffalo, and the assistant women’s rowing coach at Northeastern University. He was the assistant varsity boys coach for Community Rowing (CRI) in Boston and the head rowing coach at the Kent School, in Kent.
He is a graduate of Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, where he was a member of the varsity crew team for four years.
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