New Badge, Same Erg: The Eastern Indoor Rowing Series Explained

You open the app to check Round 2 and the badge doesn’t match what you remember. New colours, a new mark, three sets of letters where one used to sit. If your first thought was some version of woah, what is this, here’s the plain version: the series got bigger. Rowing Queensland and Rowing Victoria are racing alongside Rowing NSW now, and Round 2 is the first round to carry all three.

What was the NSW Indoor Rowing Series is, from Round 2 on, the Eastern Indoor Rowing Series. Same race, same app, one shared leaderboard across three states. If you’re reading this because you’re in Queensland or Victoria, welcome, this is exactly how it works. If you raced Round 1 in July, nothing about your own race changes. Only who else is on the board with you does.

What’s actually racing

Round 2 runs Monday 17 August to Sunday 23 August 2026, a full week, weekend included. Race anywhere there’s an erg, any time inside that window. There’s no venue to travel to and no start gun to catch.

If you’ve never raced this way before, the whole entry is this: choose your slot in the week, sit down on your own erg, row your piece, then upload the result through the app for verification. That’s it whether it’s your first indoor race or your fiftieth.

Entry is open now. It’s $30 for adults, $20 for juniors, same as it’s always been.

Round 1 doesn’t change. It ran as the NSW series in July, and it stays that way in the record. Nothing gets renamed after the fact. Only what comes next carries the new mark. If you already raced in July, that result stands as it was, under the round it was raced in. Round 2 is simply a bigger field to test yourself against next.

Why the borders stopped mattering

Here’s the part worth sitting with. An indoor rowing race doesn’t happen at a venue, it happens wherever the erg is. The result doesn’t care which state that erg sits in, only that the app can verify it. So folding in two more states was never really a logistics problem, because the leaderboard was never tied to geography to begin with. A finish line at a real venue has a postcode attached to it. A verified erg result doesn’t.

Put plainly: the format didn’t grow to fit three states. Three states grew to fit a format that was already built for it.

What happens after Round 2

The State Championships that follow the series are changing shape too, with all three states in the field. Race Round 2 and you’re already lining up for that bigger field: same numbers, wider table.

New badge, same erg, same effort you were putting in back in July. The series just made room for more people to be pulling alongside you.

Register for Round 2 →