Coed Sailing Takes Second at Admiral’s Cup, But Overall Results Mixed

Competing in four events across the northeast over the weekend, the Harvard sailing teams had some smooth sailing along with a stretch of rough seas.

The good news for the Crimson: the coed team turned in its best performances in the most important regatta. The bad news: Harvard’s other three finishes on the weekend were seventh, below the team’s usual standards.

The major event for the coeds was the Admiral’s Cup at the Merchant Marine Academy, where the Crimson finished in second place, close behind rival Tufts. The weather on Saturday—driving rain early and a dying wind with an ebb tide after lunch—led to a short day of racing, resulting in a packed final day of competition.

That was where Harvard made up ground. After the early close on Saturday, the Crimson stood in seventh place, but it used a strong showing on Sunday to propel itself into second.

While the A boat of seniors Clay Bischoff and Lema Kikuchi struggled a bit, junior captain Cardwell Potts and his crew of juniors David Darst and Gabe Dorfman picked up some of their slack. When the switch was made in the 11th race to a Vanguard 15 boat from an FJ, Potts and Dorfman quickly gained on the leaders.

“We were notably faster in the Vanguard and made huge gains on some very extreme reaches and downwind legs,” Potts said.

The strong second-place finish was paralleled by freshman Vince Porter’s third place result. Sailing single-handed in a Laser, Porter started slowly, with an 11th and a 15th place in his first three runs. After that, though, Porter finished Sunday strong, with second and first places in his last three runs cementing a third place overall.

The women’s team’s biggest regatta over the weekend was for the Dellenbaugh Trophy at Brown, and the squad was not entirely pleased with its finish in the middle of the pack.

The A boat, staffed alternately throughout the weekend by senior Michelle Yu, sophomore Clemmie Everett, junior Liz Lord and freshman Genny Tulloch, captured seventh place, while the B boat finished one spot lower.

Harvard did have the bigger picture in mind, though, and viewed the Dellenbaugh as a warm-up for the New England Championships next weekend, which will also take place at Brown.

“While we came in seventh overall, we came in third among the New England teams, behind Tufts and Dartmouth, which is great because we have a good chance at qualifying for nationals next week,” Yu said.

“It was a great chance to sail at the site of New Englands against an extremely strong fleet,” junior captain Jennie Philbrick said.

The Dellenbaugh brought teams from all over the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions, and Harvard’s eighth-place finish came against competition indicative of the type it will face should it qualify for Nationals.

As a first step in preparing for this field, Philbrick, Yu and Everett all cited better starts as key to the Crimson’s success.

“We need to work on our starts,” Everett said. “Whenever we got off the line well, we were consistently near the top of the fleet, but when we started behind, we had to take some big risks that sometimes worked out and sometimes didn’t work out so well.”

Poring over the score sheet makes Everett’s point evident. Four numbers appear more often than any others: 2, 3, 12 and 13. For every strong finish that Harvard was able to put together, a bad start led to another near the bottom. For the team to be successful next weekend, it will need to post more top finishes and turn its bad starts around so that its worst finishes will be in the middle of the pack, not at the bottom.

The coed team’s second engagement of the weekend also came in the Ocean State, where it sailed for the Moody Trophy at URI. The result—a seventh-place finish—was disappointing, but it was buoyed by a strong finish from Harvard’s B boat, captained by freshman Sloan Devlin and crewed by classmate Mallory Greimann. The duo managed to nab fifth place, helped largely by the second-place finish the tandem managed to post on each day of competition.

Like its coed counterparts, the women’s team struggled at its second site. Sailing close to home at MIT on the familiar waters of the Charles River for the Geiger Trophy, the Crimson took a third seventh-place finish on the weekend. Although the team finished behind river rivals MIT (second) and BU (third), the success of freshmen Jess Baker and Liza Covington in the A boat bodes well for Harvard. The members the class of 2006 finished in third.

Next weekend is the women’s team’s biggest of the season. It will be competing for the Reed Trophy, which is awarded to the New England Champion. The top finishers will also earn a spot at the National Championships in Detroit.

The coed team will have one last warm-up run before its New England Team Race Championships, April 26-27 at Tufts—a competition for the Thompson Trophy at the Coast Guard Academy.

—Staff writer Timothy M. McDonald can be reached at tmcdonal@fas.harvard.edu.