The sailing team is hoping for a record-breaking season after taking first place among six teams at the Staake Trophy on March 22. Bowdoin hosted the regatta and emerged from four round robins and a final four race with a record of 20-3.
“It was cold,” admitted Head Coach Frank Pizzo. “But we had good breeze and were able to run a good event. We sail in those conditions a lot and we were ready for them.”
“[The Staake was a] pretty big win for our team,” said Courtney Koos ’16. “Particularly in preparation for New England’s, [it was] an affirmation of the gains we’ve made in terms of having a bigger team that’s really capable of performing at a high level.”
Each weekend, the Polar Bears send a team to a women’s event, a co-ed event and a co-ed “B”-level event and one squad competes against schools from all over the Northeast.
Last weekend, the team sent sailors to a women’s event at Brown and co-ed events at MIT and Boston University. The team finished 12th out of 18 teams, 13th out of 16 teams, and fourth out of sixteen teams at these events, respectively.
This weekend, the team will travel to Connecticut College for the New England Team Race Championship. The top four teams will qualify for the Team Racing National Championship, a challenging regatta that includes 15 of the top 20 sailing teams in the nation. The Co-Ed and Women’s Singles Championships, both qualifiers for nationals, will take place in the coming weeks.
In the fall, despite a number of strong crews to complement the skippers, the team narrowly missed qualifying for nationals.
“We had a sense of where we would be at the end of the fall…We knew we were going to be talented; it was just a matter of putting races together,” said Pizzo.
Now, however, with several sailors having returned from abroad, the Polar Bears said they think they can elevate their performance to a new level.
“We’ve never qualified before…in either co-ed or women’s,” said Koos. “Everyone on our team is extremely excited about this, and we’ve been working really hard at the gym, on the water, in the classroom—just talking about sailing strategy. This is the first year that it’s really come together…This is the generation that’s going to qualify first, which is huge.”