Image: Eldon Lindsay, Cornell Athletics
It’s a sweltering summer day, and you’re drenched—not with sweat, but instead with cool water from the lake beneath you. The towering canvas sail protects you from the sun, keeping you a perfect blend of warm and cool. Gentle waves lap against the side of the boat, making a faint knocking noise and rocking it slightly, like a hammock with a rudder. You take a deep breath of the warm, salty air, reach for a cold beverage, and put your feet up on a cooler—what could be better than this?
I just described “sailing” to you, didn’t I?
Not for the Cornell varsity sailing team, I didn’t. How about frigid temperatures, violent left-right tacks and jibes trying to maximize the strength of the air against the sails, the vessel precariously perched on the razor’s edge of capsizing in the driving wind—one boat against 17 other teams you so desperately want to beat? Trim the sail, re-adjust your body to throw the boat sideways to catch the wind again, battle the massive, freezing waves slamming the side of the boat—repeat, re-adjust, repeat. Do that in flat out, race-mode, upwards of a dozen times in a day, up to eight hours on the water depending on the regatta and the course’s conditions, and you have yourself one of the most intense sporting events Cornell has to offer.
“It takes your whole mental and physical toughness to do it every single week,” said Bridget Green ‘25, women’s team captain and the 2023-24 Middle-Atlantic Intercollegiate Sailing Association (MAISA) conference Women’s Sailor of the Year. “When I explain it to other people, they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s just sailing,’ but it’s an all-day thing.”
Regatta weekends begin right after classes finish on Friday, with a minimum six-hour travel period to the competition location. Teams arrive at the boathouse by 8:30 AM, begin competition at 10:00, and are engaged in races until close to 7:00 PM. Once the first day of competition is finished, another identical schedule often awaits athletes on Sunday.
“We have maybe 10-minute breaks to go to the bathroom or eat, but that whole day we have to be focused and in the right headspace,” Green stated.
Rain or shine, it’s never a relaxing day on the water.
Bridget Green
Image: Cornell Athletics
Meets may be postponed due to the weather—gusts reaching 50 knots (57 mph) delayed a recent regatta by up to five hours. However, the boats return to the water the minute conditions are deemed safe, and the athletes are plunged back into the merciless waters of competition. Mistakes are natural in the relentless pursuit of speed, even for the most elite sailor, and the added unpredictability of the wind and waves make capsizing a very real possibility. Rescue boats are always on-hand to assist damaged vessels and stranded sailors.
Perhaps it’s also prudent to discuss how exactly collegiate sailing works. Besides the Herculean task of steering one’s vessel to victory, sailing’s different competition divisions add a critical wrinkle to an individual crew’s racing style.
Cornell most prominently competes in two divisions, fleet and team racing, although singlehanded (sailing with a single crew member) and match racing (one boat against another) divisions also exist under the Intercollegiate Sailing Association’s (ICSA) jurisdiction. Fleet and team racing both involve several sailors piloting a single boat, one serving as the skipper to drive and the others as supporting crew members.
Fleet racing involves 18 boats in competition at once, one for each of the competing colleges. Team racing, on the other hand, involves a head-to-head 3v3 battle between two schools, with each of the team’s three boats not only fighting the wind and water conditions, but also the other team’s trio of entries. This style of racing in particular requires immense teamwork between both the skipper and their crew, as well as each of the team’s three boats.
“I’m always talking to my crew about what our plan is going to be,” said skipper Winn Majette ‘27, who was recently named to the MAISA all-conference first team. “If the wind shifts, if our competition tacks, [then the decision becomes] whether we’re going to attack them or duck them.”
Image: Eldon Lindsay, Cornell Athletics
Recently, Cornell confirmed a bid to compete at the team racing national championship, following a sail-off victory over the University of Pennsylvania at the MAISA conference championship regatta. This will be the team’s second national bid following their victory at the Spring Fleet Race Championship, which secured the fleet entry a spot at nationals. Now, with so many divisional championships on the line, the question naturally arises: how do we crown an overall national champion?
That’s where the Leonard M. Fowle Trophy comes into play. Although each national regatta only crowns a champion in one specific competition division, the Fowle Trophy aggregates each college’s performance in each of the seven national championships (men and women’s singlehanded, match racing, women’s and co-ed team racing, and women’s and coed fleet racing), assigning a de-facto national champion off of those combined results. It sounds complicated, but it’s meant to reward the team with the highest overall achievement across all divisions.
It’s important to mention that despite the university’s proximity to a sprawling sailor’s playground in Cayuga Lake, sailing has only recently returned to the Big Red’s arsenal of varsity sports. The women’s varsity team re-emerged in 2014 after decades of club-level classification following a decade-long push by a group of alumni to restore a varsity-label sailing operation. After beginning in the 1940s, the team enjoyed a brief stint in the 1970s and ‘80s as a varsity outfit, before returning to the club ranks until a decade ago. Now, the team unites lifelong sailors from across the country and even some from further abroad.
Majette herself hails from the U.S. Virgin Islands, and has sailed since the age of six, following in her parents’ footsteps. “It’s a really popular thing to do,” she said. “[At first], it’s almost like people are taken there as a daycare. Then, it just gets more competitive.”
Green’s upbringing on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, was much of the same. “It was a summer camp thing,” she said. “It’s not this huge yacht club. It’s just that instead of soccer, all the kids on the island sailed.”
Just like how a skier may grow up in Colorado or a surfer is nurtured in California, sailors are raised along coastlines all over the world. As niche as sailing may seem, in these coastal towns, it’s as normal as baseball or basketball is on the mainland.
Still, no matter where the athletes hail from, the team atmosphere is as tight-knit as can be. Majette, new to the team this season as a freshman, was particularly complimentary of how the team welcomed her into their ranks and helped her get acclimated to Cornell, both on the water and off. Success has accompanied this positive team spirit, with the team featuring over a half-dozen All-Americans in the last five years, three consecutive spring regional championships between 2022 and 2024, and national championship berths across the singlehanded, fleet, team, and open categories in 2023.
“I am so happy I can lead these girls, because they are amazing people and we are doing the best we have ever done,” Green mused. “I have [only] them to thank for my success. It’s a lot of work, but it pays off.”
The fleet racing division will bring their spring season to a close in late May, taking on the week-long ICSA Nationals regatta hosted in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Recently, the team racing trio of boats secured a seventh-place finish at their division’s national regatta, falling just short of the top six with a 6-5 race record.
The next time you’re sitting on the Slope, gazing out towards Cayuga’s waters, keep a keen eye out. You might just spot a national champion in the making.