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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Friday, March 29, 2024

Co-Ed Sailing | Jumbos finish second at Marchiando Team Race

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The co-ed sailing team continued its spring campaign over the weekend at the 33rd Annual Marchiando Team Race at MIT. The team came in second place out of sixteen, marking a great start to a promising season. The No. 11 Jumbos, with a record of 16-6, finished behind the No. 2 Stanford Cardinals, who won the regatta with a record of 18-4.

The No. 1 team in the country, Yale, came in third place with a record of 15-7. The opening round of the regatta featured all 16 teams that attended the competition, with the top eight moving on to the finals. Of the 16 teams competing in the first round, seven of them ranked amongst the top 10 in the nation. The high-caliber opposition gave Tufts a chance to see how it stacked up against the country’s most elite teams.

“We did very well at the Marchiando Team Race,” senior Paula Grasberger said. “[We] came in second only behind Stanford, which was a pretty impressive showing.”

Tufts posted a record of 10-5 in the opening round, which tied for third place with No. 6 Boston College, No. 10 Brown, No. 8 Roger Williams and Yale. Only Stanford and No. 9 Dartmouth ended the opening round with better records, each earning a 12-3 mark. Tufts’ finish guaranteed it a spot in the final round.

Tufts suffered losses to Boston College, Dartmouth, St. Mary’s and Stanford in the opening round. The team was close to picking up wins against St. Mary’s and Harvard, but lost to both opponents, 2-3-6.

In the finals, Tufts won six of its seven matches, beating Dartmouth, Yale, Brown, Boston College and Vermont. The lone loss came to the eventual winner, Stanford, which also recorded 6-1 in the finals. The records of both rounds were added up to determine the winner. Dartmouth finished fourth with a record of 15-7 and Brown rounded out the top five with a record of 13-9.

“It was a really shifty day, and on one of the races we just weren’t able to execute play, and so [Stanford] took advantage of that and [was] able to win,” Grasberger said.

Only six Jumbo sailors competed in this race, which meant the team was comprised of three skippers and three crews. The skippers were senior tri-captains Will Haeger and David Liebenberg along with junior Alec Ruiz-Ramon. The crews were Grasberger, senior tri-captain Kathleen Kwasniak and junior Sam Madden.

Although all of the sailors at the Marchiando Team Race were juniors and seniors, the Jumbos hope to pass the baton to younger sailors as the season progresses. The veteran presence and leadership on the team, which features 19 seniors, will undoubtedly help the underclassmen sailors to develop and become the team leaders as the season progresses.

“A lot of [the learning] comes in practice, so we try to help them as much as we can,” Ruiz-Ramon said. “We really encourage [the underclassmen] to ask us what we’re doing.”

“Having the experience, you can give a lot of advice to younger sailors and really help them learn what to expect from upper level regattas,” Grasberger added.

The second-place finish came a week after the Jumbos came in fourth out of nine teams at the Jan T. Friis Intersectional Regatta at Harvard. The team’s improvement is a good sign going into the New England Team Racing Championships next week in Connecticut.

“This weekend was our best weekend of the spring season so far,” Ruiz-Ramon said. “We beat all the other New England teams ... which is a really good sign going into the New England [Team Racing] Championships next weekend, which is the qualifier for Nationals.”

The second-place finish this past weekend is the highest-place finish that Tufts has earned in the spring season, and the team appears to peaking at the right time heading into its most important stretch of the semester.