Facilities - Rowing

Directions

Lake Pickett, a spring-fed fresh water lake, has been home to the UCF rowing program since 1973 when the team was formed to compete at the club level. The McCree family told the team they could row out of their back yard. The only problem was that there was nowhere to keep the boats, so the team stored them on tables in the McCree's yard.

In 1980, Phil Goree, UCF's then Vice President for Business, told the head of the Evans family, which owned the Wheeler Grove Company of Oviedo, of UCF's need for a boathouse and a new place to row. The Evans family offered the use of a barn on land they owned at Lake Pickett. The Knights turned the barn into the rowing team's first boathouse.

During the summer of 1995, then athletics director Steve Sloan was looking to add a women's sport to UCF's athletics program. With its consistent success, women's rowing was a natural choice and was added as the department's 16th intercollegiate sport. In 2002, the Evans family sold the Knights the property at Lake Pickett.

In the spring of 2009, the UCF Intercollegiate Women's Rowing Center opened at Lake Pickett. Designed by HOK Architects, the center consists of two multi-purpose facilities, a traditional boathouse along with the team's very own clubhouse, erg training center and locker room. The 12,000-square-foot boathouse features six individual boat bays for the team's rowing shells and has easy access onto the lake via the team's new wet dock that opened in 2008. The clubhouse encompasses nearly 6,000 total square-feet and has ample space for erg training, meeting rooms and coaches' offices.