PORT ANGELES — A young Port Angeles rower needs a bit of help to attend the USRowing Olympic national development camp this June.
Ella Ventura, a 15-year-old rower with the Olympic Peninsula Rowing Association who has won several medals with OPRA at regattas around the Pacific Northwest, is raising funds to help send her to the three-week camp in Ashland, Ore. At the conclusion of the camp, attendees will go off to a competitive meet in Sarasota, Fla.
“I’m super excited” about the opportunity, Ventura said.
Ventura, who has been involved with rowing for three years now, needs to raise $5,500 to attend the camp.
So far, Ventura has raised $1,750. Anyone interested in contributing to help her attend camp can go to GoFundMe.com and type in “Ella Ventura rowing” in the search engine or go to www.tinyurl.com/Ellafundraiser.
According to her campaign, Ventura was accepted into the development program after attending a junior national team ID camp in January. This is all part of a newly launched Olympics development program that aims to develop 17 and younger athletes to compete at future U19 World Championships and to be a part of the U.S. Olympic rowing team by 2028.
Ventura is focusing on training to go along with the GoFundMe campaign.
“I’m trying to be the best I can be when it comes to this,” she said.
Ventura also said it’s nice for the home-schooled students such as herself to get these athletic opportunities.
Demonstrating her determination, Ventura recently won a couple of massive indoor rowing challenges, rowing the distance of the Alaskan Iditarod in 16 hours, 38 minutes and winning the women’s category by rowing 51,433 meters indoors in 24 hours for the Reveille Project, an organization that helps disabled vets transition from active duty to civilian life.
