Hooch win keeps McCallie sculler on the rise
McCallie School senior rower Jackson Moore is one of the top youth scullers in the United States.
In his second year in Chattanooga after growing up in the Fort Lauderdale area of Florida, Moore has won gold medals in single competition the past two weekends in the Head of the Schuykill in Philadelphia and the huge Head of the Hooch in Chattanooga, where he first raced as a freshman and finished third in 2015. He already had won the Chattanooga Head Race youth single division for the second year in a row, and the week before the Philadelphia regatta he finished seventh out of 35 in the Head of the Charles in Boston, which is the largest two-day rowing event in the world.
The 6-foot-4 grandson of former Bryan College and Soddy-Daisy and Sale Creek basketball coach Wayne Dixon won the USRowing Southeast youth regional last spring in Sarasota, Fla., and was eighth in the nationals, where he is aiming for a top-three finish next June in Sarasota. Also in the 2015-16 season, he was first in the Tampa Mayor’s Cup, second in the Head of the Giblet in Inverness, Fla., third in the Miami International Regatta and sixth out of 77 under-19 entrants in the Royal Canadian Henley Regatta.
He’s not just a solo rower, either. He was part of a winning McCallie pair and second-place 8 boat in last year’s Secret City Head Race in Oak Ridge, and he was on the varsity 8 crew that won the Tennessee Sprints and Mid-South Regional races.
Moore, now 18, naturally takes great pride in being part of gold-medal quadruple-scull and 8 boats for the U.S. junior national team in the 2015 CanAmMex Regatta in Mexico City, but by nature he’s a humble champion.
“He’s a very humble individual — that’s the best part about him,” coach Sean McCourt said. “He just goes about his business and prepares and almost fades into the background.”
Moore was an Eagle scout at age 15 and said joining the Boy Scouts “was one of the best decisions I ever made.” He also said he wouldn’t have gotten where he has without his parents’ support and God’s guidance.
His father rowed a year and a half at the University of Pennsylvania but gave it up because crew was “too time-consuming.”
“He always tells me he regrets that,” Moore said.
“I first started getting in a boat when I was 12, and I joined a team for the first time when I was in seventh grade,” he recalled.
Beginning competition on erg machines in “indoor regattas,” he went to the Southern Sprints in Melbourne, Fla., as a seventh-grader up against ninth-graders and finished sixth out of 60-plus participants.
“My coach said that was impressive for someone my age. From there it kind of grew on me,” Moore said.
Interestingly enough for a McCallie athlete, a Baylor School graduate introduced him to sculling. That was Hillary Cumbest, who was a coach at his old school for a while and now lives in Nashville, he said.
“She is pretty much responsible for everything I’ve done in the single,” he added. “As far as McCallie, Sean definitely has the program on a big rise. Our results at the Hooch show that. We had four or five top10s, and it’s the second-largest head race in the United States.”
In addition to Moore’s win in the single, he was in the varsity 8 boat that was eighth out of 63 — up eight spots from 2015 — and he and sophomore Richmond Coney were eighth out of 40 in the pair.
Moore has begun the recruiting process for college. He met the Florida Institute of Technology coach at the Hooch, where the FIT team shared the GPS boathouse with McCallie’s rowers, and interest in Moore spans the country, from Syracuse and George Washington to the University of Washington and San Diego University with Wisconsin in between, among others.
“Any of those programs would be very fortunate to get a guy like Jackson,” McCourt said.