Leah Mestayer
The Rochester Institute of Technology student concrete canoe team – and its 250-pound concrete canoe – flew cross-country this week to California. They’ll compete against the best and brightest from around the world at the 2025 ASCE Civil Engineering Student Championships, June 27-29 at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
At the risk of sounding mean, this is not a trip that many expected RIT to make. Literally, the RIT concrete canoe students themselves did not expect this trip to happen.
“It’s pretty incredible,” said club captain Leah Mestayer, who just finished their third year in school and third year on the concrete canoe team. “I was honestly very surprised, not because I think our team is bad, but just because we had zero expectations going in.”
That surprise factor certainly isn’t tied to some notion that the RIT students aren’t smart or worthy. They’re very smart and very worthy. So, let’s explain.
For starters, it has been 21 years since the last time an RIT team qualified for the concrete canoe finals. So history wasn’t necessarily on their side.
But, maybe more importantly, if you checked in on the RIT lab just a few months ago, things were not looking great. In fact, it wasn’t a certainty that the club would even have a concrete canoe this year.
First, the team found itself without a mix lead student – or much of a mix design at all – in mid-January. Mestayer worked overtime to learn as much as they could about concrete mix as quickly as possible to beat the February paper deadline.
“There was a fifth-year student on our team – Amelia Tesch – and she was the mix design lead and team captain last year,” Mestayer said. “I am very close with her, and she helped me a lot with the mix design. I appreciate her so much. And then our advisor, Lois Furioso, also works in construction and knows a lot about concrete, so she was a very good resource too for teaching me everything about mix design in about a week.”
But the adversity wasn’t over just yet.
Mestayer and the RIT team chose to use Stalite as the primary aggregate in their concrete mix. Well, in March, there just so happened to be a lightweight aggregate shortage in upstate and western New York.
“Yeah, isn’t that crazy?” Mestayer said. “We probably contacted like seven different aggregate concrete companies. Nobody had any Stalite for us to use. And we had to finish our canoe’s bulkheads, so we just used whatever we had and then hoped for the best that everything would work out.”
And everything, as we know from the spoiler at the beginning of this story, did in fact work out.
RIT went to the Upstate New York-Canada Student Conference, impressed the judges with its canoe (named “Turbo Tiger”), delivered an outstanding presentation, and earned high marks on its paper (authored mainly by student member Samantha Morgan). At the awards banquet, the team heard its name announced as finishing in second place in the overall standings – the school’s highest placement in nearly two decades.
“At the banquet, I was thinking, ‘There’s no way we’re going to place.’ And then when we did, I just started crying,” Mestayer said. “It was insane. I can’t even describe the feeling. I looked at our advisor (Lois Furioso) across the table, and I just started crying because all our hard work had shown for something.
“It was really tough at times because we kept running into problems, and we were doing so much and not seeing the rewards. But then we did, and it was all worth it.”
The proud faculty advisor felt the same.
“I cannot express enough how proud I am of this team,” Furioso said. “They have worked together, supported one another through challenges, and, most importantly persevered.
“Leah is a natural-born leader. She has a calm about her when the going gets tough, and that keeps everyone focused. It has been an honor and joy to advise the students and watch how much they have learned over the past few years. This group of students is one that every educator dreams of having the opportunity to mentor.”
And now Mestayer, Furioso, along with team members Tesch, Morgan, Jared Lobraico, Jennifer Motsko, Jennifer Leonard, Jonathan Meli, Kailey Gayton, and Thomas Pikula, are off to California and the ASCE Civil Engineering Student Championships.
The event features the finals of the ASCE Concrete Canoe Competition, the Utility Engineering and Surveying Institute Surveying Competition, and the Sustainable Solutions Competition.
“I am really excited to learn about some new technologies and new ways to go about creating a canoe,” Mestayer said. “I, personally, love concrete canoe as a club and just as a concept in general. I think it’s really cool. So I’m really excited to see what other schools do with aggregate and cementitious materials and stuff like that. And of course, excited to be in California and race our canoe.”
Through the adversity, surprising even themselves, the RIT team is making history – the school’s first concrete canoe finals qualifier since 2004.
“Yes, it is insane,” Mestayer said. “And I was born in 2004, so maybe like my whole life has led up to this moment. That’s genuinely how I feel.”
Leah Mestayer
Keep up with the ASCE Civil Engineering Student Championships all weekend on ASCE social media with the hashtag #ASCEChampionships.
