Sailing Falls Short on Day Two, Does Not Make Team Nationals

With a week of solid practices and a strong first day behind it, the Harvard sailing team seemed to have the wind at its back and a bid to Team Racing Nationals in front of it. But when the winds changed, so too did the Crimson’s prospects, as the team finished a disappointing seventh yesterday at the Fowle Trophy—the New England Team Racing Championships hosted by Salve Regina University.

“The thing about sailing is that as much as you practice, as great as you are in one certain condition, some of it is out of your control,” junior skipper Teddy Himler said. “It wasn’t our wind today.”

Harvard got off to the right start by going undefeated in its first round robin on Saturday, defeating regional powers Yale and Boston College, whom senior Michelle Konstadt said were considered the best teams in the field.

“That was awesome,” Himler said. “It showed how much we’d been practicing and our potential for the future.”

Having put together strong performances in recent weekends, including last weekend when it qualified for nationals in fleet racing, the team expected that it would be able to use its team-specific tactics and preparation to continue its successful run.

“If your team is in 2nd, 3rd, and 6th, a good team-racing team can convert that to a 2,3,4 [by blocking the 4th and 5th boats],” Konstadt said. “Normally, that’s the kind of team racing we do.”

One day in, the Crimson was right on track. But when the team hit the water yesterday, it couldn’t adapt to the increased wind, which reached between 20 and 25 knots.

“We struggled a little bit to sail and ended up not qualifying,” junior skipper John Stokes said. “We just weren’t as good as the others at making the boats go fast…There wasn’t a lot of team racing going on.”

The breeze prevented the Crimson from using its favorite tactics, turning the contest into de facto independent fleet racing, a set up for which Harvard was not nearly as prepared.

“Our forte isn’t big breeze,” Konstadt said. “We really enjoy team racing because it’s tactical.”

Even Harvard’s struggles yesterday couldn’t completely knock it out of contention, though, as the team finished tied for fifth place with BU and Brown. A top-six finish would have given the Crimson more chances to compete for a top-three finish—the requirement to qualify for nationals. But when the teams tied in the sail-off tie-breaker, Harvard found itself on the outside looking in.

“The tie-breaker was tied,” Konstadt explained, “[So] we had to go by who beat whom, and we had lost to Brown and BU in the times we had met.”

The results left the Crimson in seventh and sent it back to Cambridge with an unsatisfying conclusion to the team-racing season.

“I’m a senior, so [Nationals] would’ve been my last time to sail team races,” Konstadt said. “I thought we could’ve done really well.”

The team’s struggles in the wind won’t dampen its season too much, though, because the Crimson managed to qualify for the ICSA Dinghy National Championships with its top-five finish in last weekend’s Western Semi Finals in Seattle. While the weekend’s struggles may have slowed momentum slightly, the Fowle Trophy also gave Harvard a chance to continue to learn before it hits the water on the biggest stage.

“Maybe it’s just a matter of taking it one race at a time,” Himler said. “Huge changes in the breeze happen. Regattas are two days. We do two dozen races. If we falter in one, we should adjust our attitude and strategy. “

—Staff writer Christina C. McClintock can be reached at ccmcclin@fas.harvard.edu.