Crimson Consistent With Four Top-Seven Finishes

The Harvard sailing team ended a weekend slate of regattas without a first-place showing for the first time all season, but all four competitions ended with the Crimson finishing in the top seven.

The weekend’s best performance came from the Harvard women’s team, which entered the Women’s Regis Bowl ranked second in the country and came away with a third-place showing. The No. 6 co-eds saw their top sailors compete at the Danmark Trophy, where the Crimson took sixth place overall.

“It was all about consistency this weekend,” senior Elyse Dolbec said. “That really helped us. There were plenty of other teams that won races, but then had a lot of deep finishes.”

DANMARK TROPHY

The first of two fall regattas scheduled at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., the Danmark Trophy featured 20 teams competing on Saturday and Sunday in a jam-packed field that drew the sport’s top schools.

Boston College won the event in dominating fashion, earning just 180 total points, while Yale was the runner-up with 252 points.

Harvard took sixth overall by accumulating 301 points, one better than the efforts of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in seventh.

The Crimson was fueled by captain skipper Kyle Kovacs and crew Dolbec in a first-place showing in A-division, where junior Jon Garrity also assumed crew duties for the first two races thanks to some very windy conditions.

"We saw a whole variety of conditions,” Kovacs said. “We got there on Saturday morning and it was pretty windy, a little extreme, and by the end of the regatta there was no wind. We saw a whole spectrum of conditions.”

In B-division, women’s captain Megan Watson tried her hand as skipper in the co-ed ranks for the first time, struggling to a 15th-place finish with a combination of two crews, freshmen Teddy Himler and Meghan Wareham.

“It was a totally new type of racing for her, and it’s pretty different from women’s,” Dolbec said. “But she held her own. I think it was a good learning experience for her.”

Part of the difficulty came because of the small course. With so many teams in attendance, room on the water was hard to come by, especially with the winds constantly shifting.

“There were 20 schools there for a course that was big enough for about half the number of boats,” Kovacs said. “It was very tight, very congested.”

Dolbec said that the success she and Kovacs had in A-division was because of their strong starts, those of which resulted in nearly every one of the tandem’s races ending in the top five.

“The key was getting off the line and executing your plan,” she said. “If you weren’t in the first row at the start, other boats prevented you from being where you wanted to be. It was all about having a really aggressive start, and being able to attack and do what you want to do off the line.”

HOOD TROPHY

Saturday and Sunday, MIT hosted the Smith Trophy, a low-key, 25-team regatta on the Charles River. A combined 15 races took place over the two-day event, and the Crimson finished in seventh-place in the end. The host Beavers took top honors at the regatta, followed by Brown, Tufts, Yale, Boston College and the Coast Guard Academy.

Freshman skipper Alan Palmer and sophomore crew Michelle Konstadt sailed for Harvard in A-division, finishing in seventh, while freshman skipper John Stokes and junior crew Kerry Anne Bradford earned a ninth-place showing in B-division.

WOMEN’S REGIS BOWL

Boston University’s Regis Bowl saw 14 teams compete in as many races, with the Crimson’s second-place showing in B-division keeping Harvard in the top three.

Sophomore skipper Liz Powers and freshman crew Quincy Bok sailed in the same boat for the first time ever and earned the surprisingly high finish.

“I had only practiced with Quincy on Friday afternoon, and we ended up working really well together,” Powers said.

In A-division, the junior duo of skipper Roberta Steele and Lauren Brants took eighth-place for the Crimson on a weekend that favored Harvard and other teams used to the shifty conditions.

“Whenever you’re at a regatta on the Charles, you really have to focus on keeping your mind in the race and watching the water,” Powers said, “making sure you’re in a puff of wind, because the winds are so variable.”

HARVARD INVITE

The Sunday-only Harvard Invite was one of three Crimson-hosted regattas of the season, and it ended with Harvard in sixth place, a single point out of the top five. Tufts won the regatta, followed by Boston University, Roger Williams, MIT, and a second Tufts team.

Sophomore skipper Alex Bick and freshman crew Grace Charles looked strong in second-place for A-division, while the sophomore tandem of skipper Ali Beyer and crew Jess Walsh took eighth place in B-division.

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