Last Saturday at Yale, under blue skies and mild winds, the sails were hoisted for the start of another season for the Tufts sailing team, which began fall competition at the Harry Anderson Regatta.
The Jumbos kick-started the co-ed season with a 167-point second place finish to Washington College (140 points), Tufts narrowly beat top-ranked Harvard (168 points) to the line.
"It looks pretty good so far," coach Ken Legler said. "We did well in our first regatta, finishing second out of twenty-three."
The result was even more impressive based on who competed for seventh-ranked Tufts. Women's team captain and part-time co-ed competitor, senior skipper AJ Crane, and classmate Kristin Tysell competed in the 'A' division, forming one of the few all-female crews in the regatta. Sophomore skipper Dave Siegal and his boatmate senior Katie Shuman raced in the 'B' division.
Sailing is a 'lowest-scoring' sport; that is, the team with the lowest score wins. In this case, both 'A' and 'B' divisions held ten races, with points awarded in decreasing number the better a boat finishes -- first place receiving one point, second place two points, and so on. Penalty points are added for mishaps, and the points are then totaled at the end of the ten races. At the conclusion of both divisions' races, the two divisional totals are combined, and the teams are ranked from lowest to highest score, the lowest aggregate score determining the winner.
Washington College won the regatta comfortably by 27 points on the strength of a 60-point, second place finish in the 'A' division and an 80-point, second place finish in the 'B' division.
Further down in the standings, however, competition proved tighter. Crane and Tysell powered their boat to an 82-point, third place finish in their division, winning one of the ten races and placing second twice. The pair benefited from lighter breezes on Saturday morning, which work to the advantage of a lighter crew.
"The winds were very light until the end of the regatta," Legler said. "That favored us because of the four people we sailed, three were women, pretty small women in fact, so the light air was good for us."
Harvard won the 'A' division, accumulating just 37 points on the back of four wins. But the team was let down by inexperience in the 'B' division. Harvard sophomore skipper Vincent Porter and his alternating crew of Ruth Schlitz and Laura Schubert were disqualified once. They overran the starting line in the fourth race and withdrew from a third race on orders from Harvard coach Michael O'Connor, due to interference with other boats. The three mishaps lead to 72 penalty points for the crew, spoiling the strong sailing by the 'A' division boat.
"[Harvard 'A' division skipper] Cadwell Potts is really, really good, and he just killed everyone," Crane said. "But in the 'B' division, they hadn't had very much experience sailing in college, so they made a couple of beginner mistakes."
The Jumbos benefited from Harvard's miscues, as Siegal and Shuman sailed to one win and a second place finish. They racked up 85 points to give Tufts 167 in total, enough to sneak by Harvard. Senior co-ed captain Joel Hanneman was pleased with the result, especially considering the relatively fresh faces on the Tufts team. Though the Jumbos lost 12 seniors to graduation last spring, the squad of over 50 is talented, according to Hanneman.
"I would consider our team to be pretty young, but we have a lot of strengths in our senior class and a lot of strengths in our sophomore class," Hanneman said. "We have a lot of speed and raw talent that just has to be molded into successful skill."
Nevertheless, Legler says the results will be varied, at least at the beginning of the season, due to the competitive alignment in the co-ed and women's competitions. The women's team, which was ranked fourth in the August poll, will be without Crane and Tysell, who will continue to race in the co-ed regattas.
"The rankings are probably not indicative of how we're going to do because in the near term we're going to continue sailing with [Crane and Tysell] in the co-ed regatta," Legler said. "It's sort of a good news bad news scenario. The good news is our top women's skipper is sailing 'A' division now on our co-ed team. The bad news is that when she's sailing co-ed she's not sailing women's regattas so our women's team won't do as well as it did last year, at least not at first, until the others get enough experience to do better."
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