The Dartmouth women's sailing team struggled on the third and final day of racing at ICSA Women's Nationals, falling to an eighth-place finish in the competition with 211 points.
The team was in fourth place after the second day of racing, but disappointing results in later races left the squad just behind seventh-place Georgeton University, which finished with 208 points.
The competition was ranked in reverse order of total points scored.
Dartmouth finished 63 points ahead of ninth-place finisher Yale at the competition, which took place at the St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco, Calif on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Stanford University hosted the event.
The Big Green was never far out of contention for the top spot, as the team easily cruised into a number-two finish in the semi-finals with 81 points, assuring Dartmouth a berth in the championship round.
Many members of the team, which competed in both the A and B divisions, contributed notable results in an effort to clinch the top spot.
The A-division team was led by Kendall Reiley '09 and included Ali Hiller '11 and Steph Gagnon '10. The squad started off strong in the semi-finals with a fourth-place finish in a tight race that saw the Big Green just edge out Boston University by one point.
The B Division team, comprised of Becca Dellenbaugh '10, Sarah Johnston '09 and Anne Megargel '09, was also caught in a very close race, but pushed through to a second-place finish with 38 points, only to be edged out by winners University of Rhode Island with 36 points.
"Definitely from race to race on the first day, the points were so close, and the conditions were tough, so in some races people would have a bad race and the little things that you did wrong would make a huge difference," Gagnon said.
Entering the championship round, the two Dartmouth teams met the first day's challenge with top results, repeating their respective semi-finals performances to clinch a third-place finish in the B Division and a fifth-place finish for the A team.
Returning to complete the final day of the last round, Dartmouth sat comfortably in fourth place with 92 points, but still trailed the Bulldogs, who had captured the lead with 73 points.
As the competition concluded, the A team's final seventh-place finish and B team's sixth-place finish were not enough to improve the Big Green's chances. The team docked into an eighth-place finish.
Following Yale, other top finishers included the College of Charleston in second place with 157 total points, Boston College in third with 165 points and Old Dominion University in forth with 166 points. Brown University rounded out the top five, finishing with 197 points.
Each team's total score was the sum of its A and B division scores.
Aside from first-place Yale and fifth-place Brown, the only other Ivy League university to compete in the 18-team tournament was Harvard, which finished in 10th place with 269 points.
The Harvard B team was penalized 19 points for not finishing a race.
Yale won the Mosbacher Trophy, given to the best sailing team in the Ivy League, in late March, and has won the conference title in two consecutive years. The Big Green last won the Ivy League championship in 2005.
"I think that these are the top sailors in the country, and everyone was pushed to limit and performed really well," Gagnon said. "It was definitely a really cool experience since the races were all so close."
As the season for the women draws to an end, Gagnon said that this year was focused on improvement and adjusting to different racing venues, such as the concluding national competition in California.
"The conditions were very breezy, and were a different kind of sailing than what we're used to in the East Coast, so we worked on that this spring and changed our workouts to gear towards the different conditions," she said. "I think we improved a lot throughout the season, and overall [at Nationals] we did pretty well."
The Big Green boasts three national sailing championships in its history and 14 top-three national championship finishes.
