One Week Early, Freshmen Take to ACCs

This was more than just an opening act.

With one week left until the bulk of the heralded Atlantic Coast Championships, the underclass contingent of the Crimson co-ed sailing team had a chance to show off its progress at the freshman ACC held at Brown University. The Harvard frosh emerged ninth out of 18 competing teams, with a final score of 208 points.

“We probably could have done a little bit better than we did,” freshman Christina Cordeiro said. “But we ended up learning a lot and having a good time. It was really exciting overall, to be sailing in the A Division of the ACCs.”

“It was a big accomplishment just making it to this weekend,” fellow rookie Andrew Flynn added. “It was really an important way to end the season.”

The freshman class was best represented by its B-Division tandem of Flynn and Lauren Brants, who bounced back from a shaky Saturday performance to edge out Vermont for eighth place with 91 points.

“Our problem was that we were inconsistent, but we were satisfied with the way we were sailing when we were doing well,” Flynn said. “We didn’t do too great Saturday afternoon, but we were happy with our performance on Sunday.”

While the Crimson ultimately slid into the middle of the pack, Harvard opened the regatta on a successful note, with the A-Division duo of Cordeiro and Roberta Steele finishing third in the regatta’s opening race.

“We just had a good start—as our coach puts it, we had good wheels,” Cordeiro said. “It was exciting to finish so well in our first race, and it was exciting that we were hopefully going to continue and keep that up.”

Despite the strong initial performance, however, Steele and Cordeiro eventually settled for 10th place, finishing with 110 points.

“It was really good to get a good race like that starting off, and you’re really pumped for the event,” Steele said, “but then whenever you make mistakes later you kind of know that you should be doing better, because you know that you can.”

The weekend proved to be somewhat anticlimactic for the rest of the sailing team, as a lack of wind forced the cancellation of the Horn Trophy, which was scheduled to be held on Harvard’s home waters.

The weekend’s spotlight, therefore, was entirely on the freshmen.

“We have a very strong freshman class,” team co-captain Sloan Devlin said. “In general, their results showed consistency, which we like to see, and room for improvement, which is also good because it shows they have potential.”

In particular, Devlin lauded the improvements made over the course of the season by Brants and Cordeiro, who had never sailed prior to their arrival at Harvard.

“Those two have been very enthusiastic, they’ve taken very well to sailing,” she said. “They have a natural ability for it. We’re looking forward to the spring and getting to see them improve even more.”

While this weekend marked the beginning of a series of crucial fall championship events, most of the important action will take place next week, when the Crimson travels to Connecticut and Maryland for the Atlantic Coast Women’s and Dinghy Championships, respectively.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Rubin-Wills can be reached at drubin@fas.harvard.edu.