Crimson Continues Excellent Start to Season

The Harvard sailing team picked up where it left off last weekend, earning its fourth first-place finish of the young season and notching a key top three finish at a top-tier regatta in Kings Point, N.Y. The Crimson also kept a fleet of sailors nearby, as the team took seventh-place in a local race on the Charles River.

Through just two weeks of competition of the fall campaign, Harvard already has four top finishes in only eight competitions.

“It was a pretty good weekend for us all around,” co-ed captain Kyle Kovacs said.

NEVINS TROPHY

The No. 5 co-eds sent their best team to the Nevins Trophy in Kings Point, N.Y., where a consistent northwest wind on Saturday and a lighter northeast breeze on Sunday provided the backdrop for Harvard to sail to a third-place finish overall. In A-division, the Crimson set the tone thanks to the efforts of skipper Kovacs and senior crew Elyse Dolbec, who together compiled just 73 points all weekend, 22 better than the second-place team.

“I can’t give enough compliments to Elyse,” Kovacs said. “We did well on Saturday, and that had a lot to do with how she was turning her sail. There were lots of skippers who had heavier crews, and the fact that we were able to tough it out despite it being really windy was a testament to her.”

Dolbec and Kovacs won five of the 15 total races, helping pick up the slack for two eighth-place finishes in the lower divisions.

Sophomore Michelle Konstadt and freshman John Stokes shared time at crew with sophomore skipper Drew Robb in B-division, in one of the trio’s first top-tier regattas of their careers.

“We had a pretty young group, so the fact that we finished third was a great testament to the people we have on the team,” Kovacs said.

In C-division, freshman Teddy Himler led a singlehanded effort that also ended in eighth-place. St. Mary’s and Georgetown finished the regatta in the top two spots overall.

Despite some kinks to be worked out outside A-division, Kovacs said he was happy with the performance of the younger sailors, especially Robb.

“He showed a lot of consistency, and in those races it’s easy to turn a seventh or eighth into a 17th, so it was a good sign that he was hanging on and keeping those finishes,” Kovacs said.

HATCH BROWN TROPHY

MIT and Boston University served as the hosts to the Hatch Brown Trophy on Saturday and Sunday, where Harvard took seventh overall and Yale took the top spot.

The Crimson’s A-division team of junior skipper John Garrity and junior crew Kerry Anne Bradford took 13th place, but each successive division improved on the preceding one, as the B-division team took seventh-place and in C-division, Harvard finished in sixth.

Freshman skipper Alan Palmer and freshman crew Quincy Bock sailed in B-division while the sophomore duo of skipper Liz Powers and Kate Harris were the C-division team.

Boston College, MIT, St. Mary’s and the U.S. Coast Guard rounded out the top five, while Vermont sailed in just ahead of the Crimson.

MRS. HURST BOWL

A total of 11 races comprised the two-day Mrs. Hurst Bowl at Dartmouth, where a dominating performance from the No. 4 women’s team resulted in a 26-point victory.

Women’s captain Megan Watson skippered a first-place A-division, while freshman Meghan Wareham served as crew. The experienced tandem of junior skipper Roberta Steele and junior crew Lauren Brants were just six points away from a first-place finish in B-division, taking second behind Yale and coming in nine points ahead of Charleston College.

“There were lots of different kinds of breezes, from the super, super light which forced them to cancel a couple of races, to some big puffs,” Brants said. “We were able to handle lots of different conditions.”

Through three regattas for the women, the team’s lowest finish is third, which should result in a rise in the polls when the next Sailing World College rankings are released.

“Last year we were a young team, both of our skippers were sophomores and I was a sophomore too, so now three out of four of us are juniors,” Brants said. “Last year we were new on the circuit, so this is just a year to build and continue on the successes from last year.”

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