Sailing Racks Up National Championships

Three national championships in three weeks? The football team might be playing for an outright Ivy title on Saturday, but if the No. 1 Harvard sailing team has its way, it will capture its second and third national championships of the year this weekend.

Every year, the Intercollegiate Sailing Association awards six national titles: the Sloop National Championships and the Men’s and Women’s Singlehanded Nationals, which are held in the fall, and the Women’s and Coed Dinghy Nationals and the Team Racing Nationals, which are held in the spring. Based on the results of these six events, the Leonard M. Fowle ’30 Trophy is presented to the nation’s top all-around sailing team.

Harvard took an important first step to winning its second straight Fowle Trophy two weekends ago as co-ed captain Sean Doyle, junior Dan Litchfield and sophomore Cardwell Potts successfully defended their sloop national title, becoming the first Harvard team torepeat.

National Championships, Take One

College competitors do not traditionally sail sloops, 22-foot boats featuring a spinnaker in addition to the main sail and the jib and thus requiring three sailors.

However, these differences do not present much of a problem for sailors of the caliber of Doyle, Litchfield and Potts.

“If you’re good at sailing, you can sail almost any type of boat,” Potts says. “Having dealt with sloops before, we knew how to deal with the boat and how to make it go fast.”

That, of course, is an understatement. The Crimson called on the significant experience of two-time All-American Doyle, Litchfield, and Honorable Mention All-American Potts for the competition. Doyle, especially, according to Potts, “knows all the ins and outs of sailing.”

Still, Doyle was aware of the unique difficulties of sailing sloops going into the competiition.

“It’s so heavy you really need to be sure you’re doing the right thing,” he notes.

Even so, he was looking forward to the championships. “It’s really fun because you get to work as a team with people you don’t normally get to sail with,” Doyle adds.

Contributing to Doyle’s anticipation, the championships were held in his hometown of St. Petersburg, Fla. at the University of Central Florida, where his sister coaches the sailing team.

The competition began well for Harvard, as it triumphed in the first race. After a fourth-place finish in the second-race, the Crimson got off to good starts in each of the next three. With sloops, the start is especially important. The speed differences between boats are not significant, so good positioning off the starting line allows teams to control the entire race. Harvard proved this by taking second in the third race and going on to win the next two. Following these races, it appeared the fight for the championship would be a two-horse race.

“It became pretty clear by the halfway point of the regatta that we had to stay ahead of [the College of] Charleston,” Doyle recalls.

Harvard decided it was more important to stay with Charleston in each race to avoid losing ground than to win individual races.

“Because we were covering them so aggressively, we didn’t win as many races near the end,” Doyle says.

Indeed, the Crimson took fourth in the sixth race, but got some help when Charleston was called for a two-point penalty.

Then, at the start of the seventh race, a helicopter taking photographs for Sailing World magazine flew overhead, and the resulting noise prompted confusion among the Harvard sailors. They were unsure if their boat had crossed the starting line early, but sailors from another school told them their number had indeed been called, so they returned to the line and restarted.

Although the Crimson had actually not been called for a false start, the mishap resulted in them finishing eighth in the race and dropping two points behind Charleston. In the eighth race, though, Harvard placed fourth, four slots ahead of Charleston, reclaiming a two-place advantage.

After a tense lunch break, the sailors returned to the water for the final two races of the competition. In the ninth race, the Crimson stuck to its strategy of staying close to Charleston and managed to beat out the Cougars for sixth. But the conservative tactics allowed Navy to storm back into contention by winning the race, tying Charleston only three places behind Harvard overall.

That set up what Doyle calls “possibly the most exciting race I’ve ever been in in my entire life. It came down to surfing one wave in the last ten seconds to pass three boats. I had more highs and lows in that race than I’d like to have again.”

Despite the threat posed by the resurgent Midshipmen, the Crimson decided to focus on staying with Charleston. In a tight pack of sloops that finished within boat lengths, Harvard was able to stay right behind the Cougars in third, while Navy was well behind in ninth place, giving the Crimson the title.

Easy Like Sunday Morning

Doyle, though, could not rest on his laurels, as he, junior All-American Michelle Yu, and senior All-Americans Margaret Gill and women’s captain Susan Bonney traveled to the College of Charleston last weekend for the coed Atlantic Coast Championships.

Gill called the event the “culmination of the double-handed fall season,” and, fittingly, the Crimson won the title, outdistancing Charleston by ten places over only six races, as many were cancelled due to lack of wind.

Doyle and Yu, competing in the A division, performed respectably and placed sixth, but it was the duo of Gill and Bonney that carried the team.

With so few races, “you can’t make mistakes because there’s no time to overcome them,” said Gill.

After a false start in their first race, though, Gill and Bonney did just that, winning four of their final five, including all three on Sunday to win the B division by a whopping 21 places.

“I knew we were fast and I knew we were making good decisions, so I knew if we got off the starting line, we would end up doing really well,” said Gill.

Asked about Gill’s performance, Doyle simply commented, “She’s a clutch player.”

At the same time, the women’s Atlantic Coast Championships were being held at the United States Naval Academy. There, the quintet of sophomores Jennie Philbrick, Diana Rodin, Emily Nielson, and Caroline Dixon and senior Rehana Gubin, representing the No. 6 Harvard women’s sailing team, did not fare quite as well, placing fourteenth. The young team was hampered by a lack of practice time, due both to darkness and to the fact that Harvard owns only two Flying Juniors and two 420s, the boats used in the competition.

Additionally, Rodin became too ill to compete after only two races on Sunday. However, earlier, she and Philbrick had displayed their promise by placing second in their first two races.

“You can really see the potential in that pair,” observed Nielson.

Going It Alone

But if Rodin and Philbrick are the future of Crimson sailing, the present is led by Doyle, All-American junior Clay Bischoff, and Gill, all of whom will leave at noon today to represent Harvard at Singlehanded Nationals at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. this weekend.

Doyle—who placed tenth last year and third as a sophomore—and Bischoff—who took fifth last year—will both be looking to improve on their 2000 performances. Bischoff and Doyle will be competitors this weekend and finished first and third, respectively, in qualifying for Nationals at the Singlehanded New Englands last month. But each maintains a great deal of respect for the other.

“Clay is a very hard worker,” Doyle says. “We have similar styles [in that] we’re very analytical about the shifts in the wind and dealing with all the little small changes, and we’re similar size, so we really complement each other.”

Bischoff, too, is effusive on the subject of Doyle. “In my opinion, he is probably the best all-around sailor in the country,” he says.

The pair has been practicing in private boats at the Cottage Park Yacht Club in order to simulate the open water and larger waves they will encounter at nationals. Bischoff, in particular, has been working on sailing downwind, and both should compete for the national title.

On the women’s side, Gill will attempt to defend her national title. Much of her success, though, will depend on the conditions.

“I’m fairly small in comparison to the field of competitors,” she says.

Consequently, harsh conditions generally affect her more than some of the other sailors. Indeed, after winning the event as a freshman, Gill could “only” muster a fifth-place finish as a sophomore in the face of difficult weather.

Bischoff, though, remains impressed by her success.

“She’s pretty phenomenal because she hadn’t sailed many single-handed regattas before she came to college,” he says.

With some luck, then, the Crimson sailing team could well hold three national titles before Thanksgiving. Amazingly, looking toward the rest of the season, that could be only the half of it.