Sailing Hits Choppy Water, Takes 10th

For the first time since 1994, the Harvard sailing team failed to finish in one of the all-important top eight spots at the New England Championships this past weekend.

The Crimson, which was ranked 15th in the nation coming into the regatta, finished 10th overall and failed to qualify for the ISCA Semifinals.

The top eight finishers at the event, which took place at Brown on Saturday and Sunday, will move on to the national semifinals that will take place on April 27 and 28 at Hampton University. From there, teams will qualify for the national championship regatta.

Facing tough weather conditions, Harvard searched for success by continuing to substitute boats for both the A and B divisions at the NEISC Dingy Championships.

Sophomore Michael Drumm and junior Isabel Ruane started in the A boat. After the first nine races, fellow sophomore Gram Slattery was substituted for Drumm in the boat. The team of Slattery and Ruane finished the next six races in the division A boat, which finished with 129 points.

The freshman duo of Andrew Mollerus and Sydney Karnovsky raced the division B boat for the first four races, before sophomore Brian Drumm and freshman Jacob Bradt were substituted for races five through 10. Karnovsky and Mollerus then returned for the final five races, as the boat ended the competition with 159 points.

“We started off the regatta on somewhat of the wrong foot in the A division, but we tried to correct that going forward,” Bradt said. “In the B division, we started strong but started to struggle as we went along, which is why my boat was subbed in after the first couple of races. Then my boat started to struggle, so the first pair got subbed back in to help put a strong finish.”

The New England Conference is the toughest conference in the nation, as 10 teams in the conference are ranked in the top 20 overall nationwide.

“Overall we were just really inconsistent on the day,” Bradt said. “We would have a good race followed by bad races. A couple of factors contributed to our struggles: the teams we were facing were the best of the best, the conditions were really difficult to deal with, and we haven’t done much racing at Brown recently.”

While the biggest competition for the sailing team was the conference qualifiers at Brown, the Crimson competed at three other regattas this past weekend, racing at two coed regattas—the Oberg regatta at Boston University and the Central Series Regatta at Boston College—and at a women’s regatta hosted by the Coast Guard for the Women’s Emily Wick Trophy.

The Crimson finished 15th in the women’s regatta and seventh in the Oberg competition. The high finish of the weekend for Harvard came at the Central Series regatta, as the A and B division boats combined for a fourth-place finish.

“It was very cold Saturday with not a lot of wind, which is bad for racing,” said junior Ben Lamont, who was the A boat skipper at the Central Series. “On Sunday, the wind was a lot better for racing, and the conditions were just a big improvement.”

Sophomore Rebecca Frankel raced with Lamont in the A boat, and senior Nicholas Gordon raced with freshman Matt Clarida, who is also a Crimson news editor, in the B boat as Harvard finished with 182 points in the regatta.

In the competition for the Emily Wick Trophy, junior Caitlin Watson raced with freshman Kristina Jakobson for the first seven races and sophomore Emma Smith for the final eight in the A boat. In the B division, sophomore Ashleigh Inglis and freshman Sophie Bermudez raced for the Crimson, which finished with 320 points.

In the Oberg regatta, Harvard finished with 159 points as juniors Ames Lyman and Jacquelyn Cooley raced in the A division, while senior Jinyan Zang and sophomore Richard Bergsund competed in the B division.

Though most of the team saw some success in other regattas this weekend, Bradt focused in particular on the failure to qualify for the national semifinals.

“It is really hard to put a finger on one thing that went wrong,” Bradt said. “There were a lot of different things that added together. I think the overall theme of what went wrong is that we are a fairly young team. Not that our lack of experience is an excuse, per se, but our lack of race experience just compounded our mistakes this weekend against some really tough competition.”