No. 2 Crimson Sailers Secure Nationals Berth

Each of the last three weekends, the No. 2 Harvard sailing team has needed a top-four finish at a New England Intercollegiate Sailing Association (NEISA) championship event to secure a birth at nationals.

This past weekend, just like the first two times, the Crimson accomplished that goal.

On the heels of invitations to the national championships for the No. 8 women’s squad and Harvard’s team racers, the Crimson took fourth at the NEISA Dinghy Championship last weekend at Brown in Providence, R.I.

Unlike the more comfortable performances of previous times out, Harvard struggled to maintain its position among the top four teams that receive automatic bids to nationals, hosted this year in Charleston, S.C. The Crimson finished with 137 total points, just two ahead of fifth-place Yale.

The B-division team of senior skipper Vincent Porter and senior crew Ruth Schlitz paced Harvard, finishing second overall.

Captain skipper Clay Johnson and junior crew Emily Simon guided their A-division boat to a tie for seventh place.

“At the beginning, Clay and I didn’t start particularly well,” Porter said. “We were definitely a little disappointed about how we sailed.”

The poor start left the team with a lot of room to make up after the first day, which ended with the team in eighth place overall. Johnson and Simon sat in ninth place, while Porter and Schultz were in fifth.

The Crimson closed the gap through much of Sunday, but the final positioning was still in question going into the regatta’s final race.

“It was really close between about four teams to qualify,” Porter said. “It actually came down to the last race, and I passed two boats near the end. It was kind of lucky.”

“The regatta was extremely close,” Schlitz agreed. “It really came down to the wire.”

Despite the somewhat lackluster performance, the weekend’s result was still a positive one.

In addition to the team’s success, a few sailors picked up individual honors over the weekend. Porter, Johnson, and Kovacs joined Schlitz, captain Christina Dahlman, and sophomore Elyse Dolbec on the 2006 All-New England team.

However, the team accomplishments still took center stage.

“We’re quite excited that we were able to do well enough to put ourselves in the national championship,” Schlitz said.

“We knew the top four spots made nationals, so that’s all that really matters at the end of the day,” Porter said.

While drama filled the waters as Harvard fought its way into the top four, in reality, unless the Crimson had finished way down in the final standings, it would still be headed to Charleston.

“In all honesty, we probably would have gotten an at-large bid if we hadn’t qualified,” Porter said.

A Harvard co-ed team which has hovered around the top of the rankings all year would most likely have been looked kindly upon by the selection committee, which selects its nationals participants much in the same way that committees select at-large bids for their NCAA tournaments in sports like basketball and lacrosse.

The committee had little sympathy for the Crimson, however, in its scheduling of nationals. This year’s event begins during Harvard’s exam period—May 24—and ends June 2.

“It’s kind of tough for us because we have our exams right up to nationals, while all the other schools are out already,” Porter said. “But we’re definitely going to try to practice a lot.”

That practice will have to take a different form than the team is used to, since there are no more collegiate regattas on the Crimson’s slate before nationals.

But that doesn’t mean that the team’s skills won’t be given an opportunity to be sharpened before Charleston.

“We’re thinking about going to New York for United States Team Racing (USTR),” Porter said.

Although the USTR is not collegiate racing, Johnson and Kovacs would potentially join Porter in New York for what would be some of Harvard’s last practice of the year.

No matter where they go, however, it will be difficult to replicate the choppy nature of the southern waters they will encounter in South Carolina.

“It’s kind of tough because nationals are just a ton of current out in the open,” Porter said. “Basically, the conditions are really hard to simulate anywhere in the New England area, especially the Charles.”

And it’s that focus on nationals that makes it easier to swallow the pill that was last weekend’s performance.

“We’re just fortunate to qualify,” Porter said. “We know that we didn’t sail that well.”

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.