Crimson Begins Bid to Regain Fowle Trophy

After concluding a season which saw the No. 3 Harvard co-ed sailing team take second place in contending for the Fowle Trophy—awarded to the top performing college sailing team in the sport’s most competitive championships—the Crimson is looking to reclaim its spot at the top, a spot that belonged to Harvard the five years prior to last.

Thanks to a couple of performances early in the fall campaign, the Crimson appears to be on track to do just that.

Harvard’s sailing teams competed in six regattas on the weekend and came away with two first-place finishes, the best showing of the young season.

Junior skipper Kyle Kovacs and junior crew Elyse Dolbec guided the B-division to a first place finish at the Captain Hurst Bowl, while captain and skipper Clay Johnson and senior crew Kristen Lynch’s second place finish in A-division helped the Crimson coast to a first-place finish overall in the event. Hobart and William Smith, Boston College, host Dartmouth and St. Mary’s rounded out the top five.

“We made a statement to the other schools,” Johnson said. “To be really consistent in the top five with such a competitive fleet was really impressive, especially for Kyle and Elyse.”

The women’s team was also in action over the weekend, competing in the Man-Labs Trophy at MIT. It was the first regatta of the year for the women, which also meant the first chance to see how Harvard would replace former A-division skipper Sloan Devlin ’05. The job was handled rather efficiently by the sophomore tandem of skipper Roberta Steele and crew Christina Cordeiro, who took first place in the division to guide the Crimson to its other top finish of the weekend. In the B-division, sophomore skipper Megan Watson and senior crew Ashley Nathanson also took first in possibly the most dominant performance of the entire weekend.

“Megan and Ashley had a streak of seven first-place finishes in a row,” Steele said. “You had to be really alert, playing the shifts, having good starts and good boat speeds, and they did all those things.”

The first of the Metro Series races also took place this weekend at Boston University. Although Connecticut College coasted to a first place finish, the jockeying for positions second through six was very tight, with the Crimson coming in at third place by just five points. The A-division sophomore team of skipper Andrew Flynn and crew Lauren Brants took fourth, losing out on third place by a single point, while another pair of sophomores, skipper Jon Garrity and crew Kerry Anne Bradford, took third in B-division.

The final three regattas were the Team Racing Series One, where Harvard took second after losing a close tiebreaker to Boston College, as well as the MIT Invite and the Captains Cup, in both of which the Crimson finished third.

Harvard’s success over the weekend—especially at the Captain Hurst Bowl—was thanks in large part to the work by crews Lynch and Dolbec.

“It was a shifty venue for a crew—it wasn’t too easy,” Johnson said. “We were trying to be really conservative at such a shifty venue. We weren’t taking too many risks, and that was one of the big reasons why Harvard won.”

“We want to reclaim the Fowle Trophy again,” Johnson added. “We have some very realistic goals, and we’re ready for this year.”

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.