A strong finish for the women compensated for a disappointing coed result for the Hoyas at the Navy Fall Intersectional and the Yale Women’s Intersectional this weekend.
Though the ninth-place finish for the coed team in the Navy regatta was not quite what the Hoyas had hoped for, the women’s results in the Yale races made up for the deficit.
The Navy Fall Intersectional was the largest race of the fall season, with 20 teams and 80 boats on the water throughout Saturday and Sunday. “We finished ninth out of 20, which on a whole wasn’t great,” Head Coach Mike Callahan (SFS ’97) said, “but there are two ways of looking at it.”
In the “A” boat, junior Chris Behm and sophomore Carly Chamberlain finished second, just a few points away from the first-place Yale squad. Also contributing to Georgetown’s overall performance, seniors J.B. Turney and Caroline LaMotte came in third for the “B” division. The Hoyas primarily practice for “A” and “B” competitions, which are the sailing team’s focus in the spring national championships, and according to Callahan, the results in these two divisions were “very good.” Only Dartmouth’s two-person boats finished ahead of Georgetown’s, and only by a margin of six points.
The singlehanded lasers raced in the “C” and “D” divisions, but did not live up to their “A” and “B” counterparts.
“[Senior] Langdon Mitchell sailed on Sunday and did better, moving up to 13th,” he continued, “and our freshman Marco Teixidor had some good races and some bad races.” Callahan explained that he had approached the Navy Fall regatta differently in previous years, sending top sailor Andrew Campbell (COL ’06) to the “C” division races, in which he would defeat all of his competitors without any difficulty. Teixidor finished 10th in the “D” division.
“This year, in singlehanded events, which we only sail in the fall, we don’t do as well [as in two-person races],” Callahan said. The “A” and “B” division finishes, however, will allow the Hoyas to remain in a high national ranking.
Also this weekend, the women’s team competed in the Yale Women’s Intersectional, posting a second-place finish. Junior Blaire Herron and senior Emily Siguler came in only two points behind the winning Yale team for the “A” division. “That was a great finish,” Callahan said. “It was probably one of the best regattas Blaire had had in college.” Herron and Siguler began the day on Sunday in fourth place, and went on to win four of the last five races, moving into second place.
Sailing for the “B” division, sophomore Emily Babbitt and junior Jamie Loeks placed seventh out of the 18 teams in the competition, which “was a really good finish for them,” Callahan said. Georgetown, ranked fifth nationally in the latest Sailing World college rankings, beat both Navy and Harvard, which are ranked third and fourth respectively in the national College Sailing Rankings. This successful finish reflected the women’s team’s strength on the water.
Next weekend, Georgetown sailing returns to the Naval Academy for the MAISA Sloop Championship. They will also be competing in four other regattas, the Hoyt Trophy at Brown University in Providence, R.I., the Kings Point Invitational at Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y., the Stu Nelson Women’s Regatta at Connecticut College in New London, Conn., and the MAISA Fall Open at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va.
