North Allegheny rower Anthony Bertucci makes splash, signs with San Diego

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Saturday, April 26, 2025 | 11:01 AM


North Allegheny senior Anthony Bertucci’s introduction to rowing found him neck-deep in the Ohio River, ready to quit the sport before he ever really got started.

“I’ll be honest,” he said, recalling the humbling practice when his one-man scull flipped as a novice eighth-grader. “That was almost it for me.”

But Bertucci pulled himself up, got back in the water and, four-and-a-half years later, ended up with a deal to row for San Diego.

Bertucci, a two-year captain and a top-10 rower in program history, signed a national letter of intent with the Division I school April 15, picking San Diego over Temple.

“I think it’s a good fit for him,” NA coach Lindsay Feltz said. “He’s going to be able to contribute right away to that team culture. He’s the kind of athlete every coach hopes to have.”

The 6-foot-4, 215-pound Bertucci had a good start to the spring, teaming with NA senior Miles Rees to place third in the men’s varsity double at the Huron River Sprints on April 18 in Milford, Mich.

“Overall, it was a decent weekend,” Bertucci said. “When it was go-time in the last couple hundred meters of the race, I just think we didn’t hit it hard enough. Not quite satisfied, but not too mad about it.”

Last winter, Bertucci set a pair of personal-bests in the 2,000-meter indoor, highlighted by a top-five finish in the Men’s U19 at the 2025 USRowing Indoor National Championships on Feb. 1 with a time of 6 minutes, 31.6 seconds.

Three weeks later, he went even faster, clocking a 6:28.6 to finish third in the varsity men’s open event at the 24th annual Erg in the Burgh Indoor Rowing Championships at Marshall Middle School, placing him sixth among the fastest 2Ks on the NA all-time rowing list.

“A lot of good things happened this winter,” he said.

Bertucci has come a long way from that water-logged practice in the fall of 2020. Pandemic protocols were still in place, and Feltz was giving individualized, once-a-week training to newcomers. Bertucci had been in the water only a handful of times, but this one was without any floating devices on his scull.

“We had just taken off the pontoons, the training wheels,” Feltz said. “I pushed him off the dock to go out into the river, and he flips the boat right off the bat. But he had the best attitude. He just swam to the dock, got up, and we pulled up this boat filled with water. He said, ‘No big deal. I need to go back out. Let’s do this.’ That’s the kind of attitude and work ethic you can’t teach.”

While Bertucci put on a brave face, he began to question his desire for the sport. He had only taken up rowing because he enjoyed the book, “The Boys in the Boat,” which his mom had given him, and he noticed NA had a rowing program. But he envisioned something more gratifying than flipping into the Ohio River at a lonely practice.

“I was not thrilled about it, and I was not looking forward to going back to practice for the next couple of weeks,” he said. “That day was not a good time.

“I didn’t really get to know anybody. There were no other guys going on the days I was going. I didn’t have many people to talk to. I was just hanging out with coach Lindsay, trying to learn the sport a little bit.”

Bertucci was reinvigorated later that fall when the team held a get-together, and he met the other NA rowers. He committed to lifting weights with them in the winter.

“I figured I like weight-lifting anyway,” he said. “I’ll at least do that. Maybe I don’t come back to the water in the spring. … (But) one thing led to another, and I kept going. And by the spring, I was all-in.”

Bertucci, a straight-A student who will major in biochemistry, is one of five D-I signees on NA rowing. The girls team has four — Lauren Keyser (West Virginia) and a Duquesne-bound trio of Abigail Berger, Madison Lambert and Katherine Zema.

The Tigers will have a busy spring. They return to Milford, Mich., on May 10-11 for the Midwest Scholastic Championships, where their rowers try to qualify for the Scholastic Nationals in Pennsauken, N.J., on May 23-24. In between, they travel to the Stotesbury Cup Regatta, the nation’s largest high school rowing competition, in Philadelphia on May 16-17.

Bertucci has kept getting faster and holds high hopes for this spring.

“He has made huge improvements in the water technique-wise,” Feltz said. “Once he’s in the water, he moves the boat.”

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