The perennially top-10 ranked co-ed sailing team is on a slippery slope. It will have to start turning things around if it doesn't want to miss the mark for both national championship events for the second straight year.
Winning only three out of 14 team races left the nationally ranked No. 11 Jumbos in sixth place out of eight teams at Sunday's portion of the Friis/Marchiando Team Race at Tufts and MIT. But while the Jumbos were hoping for -- and got -- strong results sailing on their home waters on Saturday, the weekend as a whole was bittersweet.
On Saturday, the Jumbos sailed at home on Upper Mystic Lake, going 9-3 in the round robin format to finish in second place out of seven teams. On Sunday, however, the Jumbos changed venues to the Charles River, where they went 3-11.
"Saturday, we made three main sloppy mistakes, but aside from that we sailed really well," junior Andrew Criezis said. "Sunday was a bit harder since we were no longer in Larks and did not have the speed advantage as on Saturday."
"Under harder competition on Sunday we didn't step up," junior Tomas Hornos added.
It all boiled down to execution of team racing maneuvers such as mark traps and sitting on other boats. Unfortunately for the Jumbos -- particularly on Sunday -- the right tactics and thought process may have been there, but the execution was not.
In a race against Boston College, the Jumbos attempted a mark trap maneuver, which involves a boat stopping at a mark with the intention of preventing an opponent from rounding that mark. The maneuver is used to delay the opponent to allow a trailing teammate to pass the mark safely ahead of the opponent. It works best when the first boat has a leeward position -- further downwind -- on the opponent. Since the leeward boat in sailing has the right of way, the mark trap gives the first boat the ability to prohibit the opponent from moving further downwind and getting to the leeward mark. As long as the first boat can stick with the opponent, it can halt the opponent and allow the teammate to sneak in ahead, at which point the first boat can release and continue to round the mark and head towards the finish. But Tufts could not keep an overlap on BC, and it got "rolled" -- BC sailed around Tufts, ruining the attempted strategy.
"We weren't too sharp on Sunday, which caused us to lose on close boat-on-boat situations," Hornos said. "As a team, we made some stupid mistakes that we know that we can correct. We know what we did wrong -- we just need to clean up those brain lapses."
Hornos, Criezis and senior tri-captain Baker Potts skippered Tufts' three boats on Saturday, while combinations of senior tri-captain Lara Hwa, senior Christina Kelly, junior Jennifer Watkins, senior Dan Hurwit and senior Rob Dellsy saw time in the crew position. Senior Peter Bermudez switched into the skipper position for Criezis on Sunday.
Sunday's difficult competition and less-familiar waters exacerbated errors that the Jumbos may have been able to overcome had they been at home in their Larks.
"We sailed well in our Larks and on Mystic Lake," Hornos said. "We also sailed better than in the past. It's just that against really strong teams, little mistakes or weaknesses become more exaggerated."
The Jumbos know that they will not be able to rely on home-water or home-boat advantages if they are to make the Team Race Nationals that they missed out on last spring. With a long way to go, the first priority, it seems, is working on the execution of the plays -- not only in the mechanics of the moves but also in the quickness of their execution.
"[This past weekend we] finally started executing as a team," Criezis said, "[But] we need to execute faster when we are in the team racing combinations."
At the other intersectional of the weekend, the President's Trophy Women's Regatta at Boston University, the Jumbos finished 11th overall out of 13 teams. Youth and inexperience may have been a huge factor as one of Tufts' two boats was sailed by two freshmen -- both skipper and crew. The A-division boat was sailed by junior Peggy Tautz and sophomore Sally Levinson, while the B-division boat was sailed by freshmen Renee Gagne and Midori Tanaka. Neither boat finished well, with the A division pulling in 106 points in 13 races for 11th in the division and the B division racking up 117 points in 13 races, good for 10th in the division.
Tufts had a solid showing at the Admiral Alymers' Trophy at Mass Maritime, where it finished in third place out of 12 teams. As it was not an intersectional and was only comprised of teams from within the New England Intercollegiate Sailing Association, it lacked some of the nation's top teams such as St. Mary's and College of Charleston. In order to have any hope of success in a national championship, the Jumbos will need to be able to compete with such teams down the stretch.
