Not surprisingly, the Dartmouth sailing team is back on top of its game at the start of the fall season. With new rankings released just last week, the coed team is ranked third in the nation, while the women's team is fifth overall. Not bad for only two weekends of competition under their belts and neoprene suits.
Before the start of the fall season Brian Doyle, the team's head coach for the last 10 years, retired from the head coach position in favor of spending more time with his two new toddlers. In his stead, former assistant coach Brian Stanford has stepped up to the head coach position.
Stanford has done an amazing job thus far keeping his team solidly at the forefront of the national competition. He is currently assisted by a couple of graduated but handsome '04 sailors Scott Hogan and Jon Kling, who simply refuse to leave campus and enter the real world.
In the team's debut on Labor Day weekend a team of Erik Storck '07, Killarney Loufek '07, Peter Fleming '05, Liz Hyon '05, Jimmy Attridge '07 and Todd Whitehead '06 traveled down to Yale to compete for the Harry Anderson Trophy, the first intersectional competition of the season. Only a few points out of first the entire event, the team sailed through a multitude of wind conditions to finish fourth overall.
Since the world is highly influenced by the Dark Lord, at the next weekend's intersectional regatta a team of Storck, Clementine James '05, Andrew Loe '06, and Elisabeth Kreter '05 raced in four races at the Captain Hurst Bowl here at Dartmouth to finish fourth in a 24-team event.
A team of Mike Wilde '07, Sophie Ryan '06, Garrett Holmes '05 and Debbie Sperling '06 cleaned up at the Hewitt Trophy at UNH, winning by over 40 points. The team won nearly every race to completely dominate the other teams at the event.
Further thrashing occurred down the road at the Great Herring Pond Trophy hosted by the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. A team of Whitehead, Christina Duncan '06, Attridge, and Meaghan Ferrick '07 won the event outright for the third year in a row.
Just to make sure that everyone in New England knows that Dartmouth Sailing is the best, at the Metro Series hosted by Boston University a team of Ben Sampson '08, Laura Sheinkopf '07, Giancarlo Nucci '07, and Kate Hacker '07 went ahead and won every single race in the A division and consequently were unbeatable in the regatta.
In Sloop-a-Loops at The Sloop New England Championship at Niantic Bay Yacht Club juniors Erik and Karl Johnson and Paul Durkee demonstrated their superior boat-handling skills, winning a few of the heavy air races while the winds ranged between 25 and 35 m.p.h. Unfortunately the team pulled their trigger a little too early and was over the line in the last race, causing them to drop back to sixth overall for the event.
In other locations around New England conditions were a little more forgiving. While Emily East '06, the usual women's B skipper, was on shore with the Sloop-a-Loops hoping for the wind to die down, the team put in Loufek and Duncan to sail B division at the 19-team intersectional women's regatta, the Mrs. Hurst Bowl at Dartmouth. Seniors Lauren Padilla and Liz Hyon showed their prowess in A division, winning overall in a weekend that threw at them winds anywhere from 3 to 15 m.p.h. The determined but lightweight team of Loufek and Duncan had a bit of trouble in the heavier breeze despite grunting up most of the windward legs. The team slid into a fourth place finish overall.
For the entire weekend, the team continued to show its depth, winning the Casco Bay Open and the Western Series as well as a second-place finish at the Hatch Brown Trophy.
On the men's singlehanded front, the team qualified four of five sailors for the singlehanded New England Championships. Andrew Loe, Giancarlo Nucci, Erik Storck and Mike Wilde will comprise nearly one-fourth of the fleet at the championships in two weeks.