Brown’s coed sailing team coasted across the finish line of the Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association Match Race National Championship on Sunday, closing the book on a phenomenal fall season.
The Bears, who were the defending champions, finished in second place in this year’s competition — marking the coed team’s third consecutive year on the podium.
Just a week before, the coed team placed second at Open Singlehanded Nationals, while the women’s team placed sixth at Women’s Singlehanded Nationals.
With these three results, Bruno finished the fall season as “the best of any team in (the) sport,” Head Coach John Mollicone wrote in an email to The Herald.
Led by Guthrie Braun ’26, the coed team included Katherine McNamara ’26, Camren Spriggs ’27 and Charles Gish ’28. Braun had an “incredibly impressive” performance as skipper, Mollicone wrote.
“I’m super proud of the team’s overall performance,” McNamara wrote in a message to The Herald. “We went into the regatta trying to perfect everything we had learned” throughout the fall season.
But the competition wasn’t smooth sailing all the way. The team had to push hard for its victory, particularly in the knockout round against Harvard.
“We found ourselves trailing heading into the final leg of the race, and needed to perfectly execute our maneuvers to have any chance of winning,” Braun explained. “When the time came, we executed perfectly and were able to pass them right at the finish to move on to the semi-finals.”
Though last weekend’s triumph marked the conclusion of the Bears’ fall season, the team does not plan on losing momentum just yet. After the off-season, Brown’s sailors will travel to Miami for a practice week in January, and they will host the 2025 College Sailing Open and Women’s Team Race National Championships in April, according to Mollicone.
“Our team is extremely motivated, and many of them would want to keep on practicing and competing right now if they could,” Mollicone wrote.
“This caps off a great fall season, and gives us a lot of positive momentum heading into the off-season,” Braun added.
