Harvard’s Younger Sailors Gain Valuable Experience in Second Weekend of Competition

After opening its fall season with a trophy victory and three additional top-five finishes, the Harvard sailing team shifted its sights to giving its younger athletes the opportunity to compete against some of the region’s strongest sailors.

The Crimson competed in four local regattas, highlighted by junior Kate Danielson’s runner-up finish at the NEISA Women’s Singlehanded Championship. Harvard also finished eighth at the Hatch Brown Trophy, 15th at the Regis Trophy, and sixth at the Mystic Lake Invitational.

With several of his veteran sailors not competing this weekend, head coach Michael O’Connor viewed the weekend as an opportunity to build experience early in the season.

“I’m very excited that a lot of our younger players got starts and are getting good quality experience playing at a high level,” O’Connor said. “I don’t know the exact math, but I think probably almost half of the people that started this weekend were first-years, and several sophomores.”

The weekend’s strongest individual performance came from Danielson at the two-day NEISA Women’s Singlehanded Championship, hosted by Boston College. Danielson finished second in the field of 11 with 44 points, second only to Yale’s junior Audrey Foley, who won with 32.

Danielson entered the weekend with plenty of experience on the national stage. The junior earned ICSA All-America honors last season and has been named an All-NEISA Women’s Skipper twice, while finishing ninth at the ICSA Women’s Singlehanded National Championship last fall.

Danielson established herself near the top of the standings immediately, opening the championship with finishes of second, first, and first. She followed with four consecutive third-place finishes before adding another runner-up result in Race Eight. After a more difficult stretch of eighth, sixth, and ninth place finishes, Danielson closed the regatta in third to secure second place overall.

“I’m not surprised at all,” O’Connor said. “Kate is one of the best players in the country, and she’s very good in the ILCA Six class, which is what the singlehanded championship is contested in.”

Danielson’s second-place finish also qualified her for the ICSA Women’s Singlehanded National Championship, which will be held in New York this November. O’Connor believes that the junior can contend for the title.

“She’ll have a chance to win the national championship in New York in November,” O’Connor said. “I think she’s a great all-around player, but she’s also a very good singlehanded sailor, and we’re very lucky to have her.”

Danielson was joined near the top of the standings by freshmen Grace Montgomery and Louise Martin, who finished fifth and sixth with 66 and 71 points, respectively. Montgomery is the younger sister of 2026 graduate Sophia Montgomery, a two-time women’s singlehanded national champion who competed at the 2024 Paris Olympics for Thailand.

Montgomery had single-digit finishes in all 12 races, including runner-up performances in Races Five and Ten. Martin recorded 10 single-digit finishes and ended particularly strong, placing fifth, first, and fifth in the final three races.

Outside of the singlehanded championship, Harvard’s faced a tougher weekend across its other three regattas.

At the three-division Hatch Brown Trophy hosted by nearby MIT, Harvard finished eighth with 197 points, behind champion Yale’s 100.

Senior co-captain Zoey Ziskind and senior Christina Chen led the A Division and finished with 57 points, highlighted by a second-place result in Race Four. Freshmen Max Wolfensberger and Zia Zucker sailed in the B Division, while seniors Xavier Ayala-Vermont and Julia Downey competed in C.

Wolfensberger and Zucker showed flashes of potential, opening with a second-place finish and later taking third in Race Five, but double-digit results in four of their eight races pushed the duo’s final score to 68.

Ayala-Vermont and Downey similarly recovered from a difficult start. After finishing 12th and 14th in their first two races, the pair recorded top-nine finishes in five of their final six races, including a third-place result in Race Three.

“We had flashes and moments where we were executing the way we wanted to, and the conditions were pretty tough,” O’Connor said. “There were times where you could be doing the right thing and the breeze wouldn’t cooperate with you.”

Still, the head coach pointed primarily to execution, not conditions, as an area for improvement.

“Early on, our execution isn’t great, and as I said, we had some young players in very difficult roles,” he said. “But I’m proud of the fact that we’re working at it, and we will get more consistent.”

The weekend also gave Harvard’s coaching staff an opportunity to experiment with combinations after the program graduated several four-year starters from last season’s national championship-winning roster. Senior Robby Meek, the defending ICSA Open Singlehanded National Champion, is also away from collegiate competition this fall while training for an Olympic bid.

“We graduated a lot of very good players who had a lot of experience and were starters for four years,” O’Connor said. “There’s a lot of opportunity for younger players to get reps and that starts at the top level, and we’re going to use that to develop these players as best we can.”

While coaches evaluate combinations extensively in practice, O’Connor said competition offers a different measure of how sailors work together.

“You learn the most about the players and how they work together and how they execute in regattas,” O’Connor said. “We’re always trying to find the right people to fit in the right roles and have the right combinations.”

At the Regis Trophy hosted by Boston University, sophomores Grace Naylor and Skyler Reading joined freshmen Elizabeth Jacobsson and Noelle Brighton to represent the Crimson. Naylor and Jacobsson finished with 126 points in the A Division, while Brighton and Reading posted 135 in B, leaving Harvard 15th overall with 261 points.

At the Mystic Lake Invitational, Harvard finished last in the six-team field with 296 points. Juniors William Bourell and Antonia Kolb led the Crimson with 67 points in the A Division, including a four-race stretch of fourth, third, fifth, and sixth.

Freshmen Pax Huybers and Whitney Pickett finished with 94 points in B, while senior James Bergstrom and junior Mizuki Yashiro recorded 135 in C.

Despite the difficult overall finishes, O’Connor said the coaching staff entered both events understanding the challenge its younger lineups would face.

“We expected those results with the people that we were starting,” O’Connor said. “We knew that they were going to be up against competition that was superior, and anything that they did at both of those regattas that was good was basically going to be gravy.”

For O’Connor, exposing less-experienced sailors to that level of competition is itself part of their development.

“Sometimes we put people in regattas that might be above their head a little bit because they need to learn what they strive for and what they need to become,” O’Connor said. “Sometimes the best way to see that is at a regatta.”

Managing four simultaneous competitions also places unusual responsibility on Harvard’s sailors. With three coaches typically covering the team’s regattas, the staff may move between nearby venues, but the nature of collegiate sailing limits how much instruction coaches can provide during actual competition.

“In our sport, the sailors have to coach themselves,” O’Connor said. “We can’t coach them during a race. We can only talk to them between races, and in certain situations, sometimes we can’t talk to them after every race.”

That dynamic makes sailors’ ability to diagnose their own performances especially important.

“The players have to really be able to coach themselves, and good sailors are able to do that,” O’Connor said. “We trust that we prepared them adequately so that they can assess the situation properly. That’s what you need to do to be good in our sport: think on your feet.”

Through the first two weekends of the season, O’Connor identified one area in particular where Harvard needs to become more consistent: its starts.

“We need to be more consistent at controlling our position on the starting line and in the moments immediately after the start,” O’Connor said. “It’s utterly crucial, and our execution there has not been what it needs to be to win at the highest level.”

The Crimson will have another opportunity to make those improvements during another four-regatta slate next weekend. Harvard is set to compete at the Eagle Invitational at Boston College on Saturday and at the two-day Mrs. Hurst Bowl, the Hoyt Trophy, and the Hood Trophy.

After a weekend focused heavily on development, O’Connor said he does not want the team measuring its progress solely through the standings.

“I hope we just continue to focus on the process and not necessarily the results,” O’Connor said. “We want our players to play the right way in every regatta, and we’re going to do everything we can to prepare them for those regattas this weekend.”

—Staff writer Tamar H. Scheinfeld can be reached at [email protected].