We are on the way home from our first regatta of the season. In our spring season we do team racing. Instead of 18 boats, one from every school, racing against each other at the same time, we sail 3 vs. 3 and the lowest combined score wins. So for instance if we finish the race with a 2-3-4 (9 points) and our opponent finishes in a 1-5-6 (12 points) we win the race. Team racing is a very different style of racing because you always have 2 of your teammates to help you out if you fall behind.
Since we are sailing only one other school at a time, we compete in a round robin format. At this regatta, the Graham Hall team race, there were 16 teams competing. After racing on Saturday we had completed our round robin and had a record of 7 and 8. Today we split the fleet in half into a top 8 and bottom 8. We were one win shy of making it into the gold fleet, but were the top seed starting the day in the silver fleet. We only lost one race today finishing the regatta with an overall record of 13 and 9 winning the silver fleet and finishing 9th overall.
I am happy with my own performance, as well as the team’s. This weekend I had some of the best team racing starts that I’ve ever had since competing in college, and even better than that, I know what made them so good, which will allow me to learn and keep having these good starts.
As for the team, I couldn’t have expected us to sail any better. The races we lost were due to small mistakes that can easily be fixed. We had great communication on the water, and seemed to always be doing the right thing. One of our goals coming into this event was play recognition, usually the team who realizes what play they are in and acts on it first, is the team who wins. This is something we executed very well all weekend, recognizing the play, and using our boat speed to execute it.
A great regatta for ODU. We are looking forward to a solid week of team racing practice during spring break, and another regatta at St. Mary’s next weekend.
Oh! I forgot to mention that we finished early enough today to make the ODU men’s basketball game in Richmond on our way home GO MONARCHS!!