The Shawnigan Lake School rowing crews captured one gold and two bronze medals at the 2012 Canadian Secondary School Rowing Championships (C.S.S.R.A.) in St Catharines, Ontario.

Picking up the gold medal for Shawnigan was the Junior Girls Lightweight 4+ crew who beat out their top competition Branksome Hall from Ontario by 2 seconds with a time of 7:47.99. Having been edged into a second place finish by Branksome in the semi-final the Shawnigan crew was particularly keen to take them on in the final. "The coaches from both schools know each other so there was definitely a competitive feeling, but going into the finals, I really just wanted to race well and make my coach proud. I just thought about it one stroke at a time, which made the end that much more exciting!" states Maia d.T.

"Since we had not showed our best performance at that point we were confident going in that we had potential to improve our times. The plan was to be patient and focus on one race at a time," states Shawnigan coach, Danielle Beare, who was not surprised by her crew's success. "I didn't expect them to win but neither was I surprised when they did. They trained very hard during the year and were prepared for a tough race. Our heat and semi times set us up to be in the medals if we raced."

The entire gold medal crew with the exception of one also brought home a bronze medal with the Junior Girls 8+. The Shawnigan Senior Girls Lightweight 4+ also captured a bronze in their race while the Senior Boys 4+ and Senior Girls 8+ both had 4th place finishes just narrowly missing a medal. Grade 12 student Jordan J. placed 5th in the Senior boys Lightweight 1x category.