The beginning of May presents two milestones for the Dartmouth sailing team: one month until the ICSA championship and the thawing of Lake Mascoma. Over the next weeks, the team will have plenty of opportunities to fine-tune technique and break in a brand new fleet of boats as the women prepare to defend their national championship and the coed team looks to improve on last year’s third-place finish.
“It was impressive that we managed to get through all of our conference championships successfully considering we hadn’t practiced on our home lake because it was frozen,” co-head coach John Storck said. “Now there are definitely small details we need to improve upon. The big picture stuff is all there, but we need to correct the small details that we couldn’t fix because we weren’t able to practice.”
Last weekend, the coed team secured a spot at the Gill Coed championships by finishing second out of 18 teams at the Coast Guard Bowl for the New England Dinghy Championships, hosted by Yale University. The Bulldogs beat out the Big Green for the top spot by 63 points. Dartmouth sailors and Storck received NEISA awards for their success this past season.
In Saturday’s competition at Short Beach Cove, the sailors could fit just four A Division races and three B Division races before unstable weather barred the sailors from racing.
Conditions improved slightly Sunday, as the winds shifted and the teams sailed six races in the A Division and seven races in B Division. That afternoon, however, winds reached upwards of 15 knots.
“One of our biggest strengths as a team is taking a level-headed approach to each day on the water,” Scott Houck ’15 said. “Everyone is always going to check the weather, checking if it will be windy, rainy or shifty and think about that in a negative way. As a team, we don’t let those conditions affect us in a negative way. Instead, we try to think about how we can give ourselves the best shot given the conditions.”
Yale’s win brought it the Bowl for the first time since 1981. The Bulldogs won with an A Division score of 47 and a B Division score of 64, bringing their total to 111. The Big Green followed with an A Division score of 67 and a 107 in the B Division. Boston College came extremely close behind the Big Green, rounding out the top three, just one point shy of Dartmouth.
“Figuring out which way to get to each mark the fastest this weekend really was a mental game,” co-head coach Justin Assad said. “We have a strong boat handling technique that has given us success, and this whole weekend was a cerebral style of sailing.”
Matt Wefer ’14 and Avery Plough ’14 took second place in A division. Deirdre Lambert ’15, Nate Greason ’17, Julia McKown ’17 and Houck took sixth place in the B division.
For their performances, three Dartmouth sailors won all-New England honors. Wefer received first team all-NEISA skipper, Plough received first team all-NEISA crew, and Houck was awarded second team all-NEISA. Co-head coach Storck was named NEISA Coach of the Year.
“When you have a full team really working together and focusing on the process of getting better every day, instead of focusing on results, you see success,” Storck said.
Now, back on home turf, the team is ready to gear up for it’s final competitions.
The previous weekend, the women’s team punched its ticket to the Sperry Top-Sider Women’s National Championship in Annapolis at the end of May by finishing third at the Reed Trophy to capture one of the NEISA’s eight spots at the championships.
The team finished in third place at the Reed Trophy with a third-place finish in the A Division and a sixth-place finish in the B division to end up 47 points behind the champions from Yale. The women’s team also had to fight off another close challenger, edging the University of Rhode Island by five points.
Last year, the coed team finished third at the Gill Coed Championships with a score of 256, 41 points behind the champions from the College of Charleston. The women dominated the field for their victory in 2013, finishing a clear 38 points ahead of St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
The team will break from competition until the championship regattas in early June.
