HEAD OF HER CLASS

Success continues for elite rower whose crewing days started at SG

EMILY KALLFELZ ’15

WON the Women’s Championship Singles at the Head of Charles Regatta this past October in Boston.

Emily, a soccer and swim captain while at SG, won the three-mile race with a time of 19:04. The Head of the Charles is the world’s largest two-day rowing event and features over 11,000 athletes in 55 different events.

“I was very excited, for sure,” Emily said about her win. “I raced in 2019 and did relatively well against the same cohort,so I [thought,] I think I can handle this, but I started really far back in the pack — that was going to be probably one of the bigger challenges.”

Kallfelz, a Cambridge resident who does her training on the Charles River where the race took place, started all the way back at bow 20 — meaning she had a lot of people to row through in order to secure the win.

One of the rowers Kallfelz was able to overtake? A 2020 Olympic gold medalist from New Zealand, Emma Twigg.

“The Head of the Charles is a really fun event and I don't think anyone peaks for it,” she said. “You show up and you do what you can. Everyone is at different levels of fitness and speed. I went into it like it will be a fun race and you do your best.”

This win for Emily adds to a laundry list of accomplishments in rowing since her time at St. George’s. After graduating from the Hilltop in 2015, Emily attended Princeton University, where she was a four-time Ivy League champion, a four-time First-Team All-Ivy member, and a 2019 First-Team All-American. In the classroom, she majored in operations research and finance engineering with a minor in computer science.

While her plate was very full during her collegiate years, Emily said her time at St. George’s helped prepare her for the challenges of the Ivy League, both as an athlete and as a student.

“[Playing multiple sports at SG] and the rigor of school prepares you for having to deal with a lot of work, hard course loads – a lot of different priorities that are pulling you in different directions, being able to deal with all that and still excel,” said the Jamestown, Rhode Island, native. “It prepares you well for all the challenges you’re going to face, especially as a student-athlete.”

Specifically, she said her time as a swimmer here has helped in her transition to the next phase of her athletic journey.

“I think the mental side translates a lot,” Emily said. “There’s the mental side of being able to push yourself, being determined, and the daily grind of training. And there’s the physical side. It’s a pretty aerobic sport. Swimming and rowing are power-based, so it definitely helps, and also general athleticism, growing up playing a lot of sports.”

Looking ahead in her rowing career, Emily has big goals — Olympic-sized ones.

After missing some time due to injury, Emily earned herself a spot on the 2022 Senior National Team this past year, the team that represents the U.S. at the highest level of international competition. Kallfelz, who these days trains alongside her mostly remote work as a solutions architect at Flywheel Software, said the selection of the teams occurs each year, so she hopes to be selected again in 2023. She would then need to be selected in 2024 in order to compete in the Olympics that year.

“I was very excited to be selected this year. I was maybe six months into training, which is not very much,” she said. “So that was exciting to get back from injury and be able to compete with the best of the country. This year, I would like to do better, just keep improving and getting faster. And then the following year is the Olympic year — and that’s the real deal.”