After a disappointing end to the 2007-08 season which left Tufts out of the national championship regatta for the first time in several years, the Jumbos are looking to rebound in full force.
But the Jumbos will be doing so without some remarkable talent lost to graduation in the spring. In particular, the women's team will sail without its leader, last year's captain Kaity Storck (LA '08), who was awarded the New England Intercollegiate Sailing Association's (NEISA) Women's Sailor of the Year award at the end of the spring season. A two-time Intercollegiate Sailing Association (ICSA) All-American, Storck and crew Lyndsey Gibbons-Neff (LA '08), who garnered All-New England and All-America Crew awards, led a women's team that reached as high as No. 5 in the national rankings last spring.
"In terms of major losses, it's Kaity Storck," senior tri-captain Dan Altreuter said. "She was College Sailor of the Year. That says a lot right there. She was a key part of the team."
The other major departure is Michael Easton (LA '08), a second-team All-New England skipper who helped the co-ed team to a top-10 national ranking for most of the season. As a skipper, Easton's absence will be acutely felt in the fall season.
"In the fall, we're trying to focus on building up our fleet racing skills," Altreuter said. Fleet racing, as opposed to team racing, relies more heavily on each individual skipper to pull his own weight, whereas in the team racing format, three boats on a single team work together to get the best combined score.
After losing such a critical senior class, the Jumbos are looking for some younger sailors to step up to the helm. One of these people will be junior Tomas Hornos, the 2007 Snipe World Champion and one of the Jumbos' strongest sailors last year. His potential is critical for Tufts.
"We're a pretty underrated team right now, but we're very enthusiastic about the potential of the team," Altreuter said. "[Hornos] is coming on strong and doing really well. We've also got a great freshman class."
"Last year was a relative disaster because we didn't qualify for nationals, but we came very close," Hornos said. "This year, we want to do that, and I think we will. We have a lot of good junior and senior skippers. Once we get [to nationals], we want to see what we can do. Hopefully we can take advantage of our potential and win."
The co-ed team, looking to bounce back from last semester's letdown at the end of the season when it finished 12th out of 18 teams at the National semifinal, three spots short of advancing to the final, is already off to a good start this season. At the Harry Anderson Trophy regatta at Yale University last weekend, the Jumbos finished fourth out of 20, beating many of the best teams in the nation, including Harvard, Georgetown and St. Mary's.
The Jumbos were led by senior Peter Bermudez, who finished tied for second in the B division. Bermudez effectively saved the team from disaster, as senior tri-captain Baker Potts and his boat were involved in a protest that they eventually lost. The A division boat's score took a beating for the disqualification and could have done severe damage to Tufts' early season campaign were it not for Bermudez's strong sailing.
"Peter Bermudez had a really good weekend at Yale," Hornos said. "He definitely stepped up for the team when we needed it."
Tufts hasn't won a national championship since 2003 in women's dinghies, a victory which followed a dominant run last decade. Over that stretch, the Jumbos won 18 national championships in co-ed dinghies, women's and team racing combined. While it will be a long road back to that kind of success for the Jumbos, with some strong young talent and good senior leadership, the horizon is bright.
This weekend, the Jumbos will be represented at seven regattas in the area, including the Hatch Brown Trophy regatta at MIT.
