The sailing team has seen its share of ups and downs on the water this year, but it has battled back and is looking to end the season strong.
Despite losing an established senior class to graduation last year, the squad has tried to successfully regroup and keep its focus.
"I would say that it was kind of a rebuilding season," sophomore Katie Greenlee said. "We graduated almost our entire starting lineup this year."
Still, the group has churned out solid efforts in several regattas this season, starting with the Truxtun Umsted Intersectional after spring break, where the Jumbo sailors, led by sophomore Baker Potts in the B division and freshman Tomas Hornos in the D division, took sixth place.
Tufts also saw strong finishes in the Admiral Alymers Trophy and the Tyrell Trophy at Salve Regina, where it took first and second places, respectively.
The Jumbos came up big once again at the Sloop Series IV, the qualifiers for the New England Sloop Championships to be held this fall. Junior Jack Wittpenn, Potts, sophomore Hans Tiefenthaler and freshman Sid Richardson took 16 points to lead the pack.
Tufts squared off against top competitors once again at the New England Dinghy Championships, where senior quad-captain Zander Kirkland, junior quad-captain Kaity Storck and junior Lyndsey Gibbons-Neff joined Greenlee in sailing for eighth place at the event.
"We were doing very well in both divisions, and the conditions were really shifty," Greenlee said. "The breeze would switch around 180 degrees during races, but at the end of the day the competition was really tight. We ended up on sort of the wrong side of the bubble."
The Jumbos were excellent in all-female competition this year, posting four overall victories including a win at the Women's New England Championship.
The women kicked off the spring season with a successful third-place showing at the St. Mary's Women's Intersectional, cruising in behind St. Mary's and Yale. The junior duo of Gibbons-Neff and Storck led the A division with 48 points, only to come back the following weekend and team up with classmates Chryssa Rask and Chloe Starr for first place in the Emily Wick Trophy.
In the Sloop Shrew regatta, held the same weekend, the pairs of A division sailors senior Gretchen Curtis and junior Meredith Ginley and B division sailors senior quad-captain Emily Randall and senior Emma Creighton tallied 77 total points for another first-place showing.
Tufts came back strong the next weekend to win the Duplin Trophy, accumulating 106 points at home to beat out runner-up BC by over 30 points. The Tufts A boat of Curtis and Rask led its division with 43.
After experiencing a rough patch during which they placed 14th out of a field of 16 and seventh out of 15 at the President's and Dellenbaugh Trophies, respectively, the women found their groove again to dominate the Reed Trophy Women's New England Championship, held at Conn. College. Beating out 12 competitors, the Jumbos combined for 89 points, with skippers Randall and Storck and crews Gibbons-Neff and senior Jen Giroux garnering All-New England honors in the process.
"We've practiced really hard for a really long time, and we finally got really eager this season to push ourselves to the next level," Storck said. "We never got a lot of opportunities to sail team racing regattas even in the beginning of the season, so that sort of got us a little fired up and made us push ourselves even harder, and we were rewarded at the end."
Although the team will graduate several seniors this year, including the entire women's B division, strong classes of sophomores and juniors and this year's promising class of freshmen will be ready to step up for the Jumbo crew.
"We have a really solid class of juniors as well as sophomores and freshmen that definitely can step up for next year and continue to do well," Storck said. "For the women's team, we're going to lose a lot of seniors, so that will hurt a little, but I think we'll be able to figure something out. Our co-ed team is definitely going to be okay. The experience that they got in the fall will help a lot for next year."
"We're really optimistic about our freshmen," Greenlee said. "In particular, Tomas Hornos has been already very key, and the others are getting much better very quickly. They're going to be good next year."
