Thank you so much for supporting my opportunity to sail in the 2021 US Sailing Youth Match Racing Championship. It was such an incredible opportunity to be sailing against some of the best match racers in our Country. I knew nothing about match racing going into this event, so I was able to learn a lot!
Before the event, our whole team was only able to train together for two days. Our Team consisted of Jeffrey Petersen, Reade Decker, Max Brennan and myself. I thought this would have been a handicap because of the lack of boat handling practice, but it turned out that we all worked really well together. On the first day, we were all pretty shocked by how well we were doing, so it built our confidence as a team. It was incredible to see how fast we all learned our positions.
I was really thankful that Jeffrey asked me to sail on his team and also that he is an excellent match racer. This definitely helped because he could teach me so much about the boat and what my role was and how to perform for the success of the team.
I was placed on main trim, thankfully, something I have some experience with. Reade did bow, which was a little new for him, but he did very well, and Max trimmed the jib.
When we got to the event, we had two days of practice at Dave Perry’s Clinic. This definitely helped a lot because we had various wind conditions, and we were able to watch the other teams and learn what their strengths and weaknesses were. Overall, we thought we did pretty well.
The first race day of the round-robin went pretty well. We didn’t win all of the races, but we were tied for second. We essentially used the round-robin as another practice day to help us prepare for the second round-robin, and the final day of racing. This took off the pressure and let us focus on what we needed to improve upon.
The second day was very interesting. It was very shifty, and we didn’t do well in the beginning. We had a tough second round robin, but an even tougher quarterfinal. In the quarterfinals, we sailed against Alec Fisichella. He was really tough competition for us, and it took five races to win. Alec was great in the pre start, and also had great upwind speed and tactics. As a team, we were really happy to have sparred against Alec to prepare us for the Semi Finals. I believe racing Alec helped us prepare for our next competitor, David Wood.
In the Semi Finals, we raced against David Wood, who is an incredible match racer. I was very happy that we were able to sail against him, because I could learn so much more about match racing. It was very close racing, often times by one boat length, but we were able to win and advance to the next round.
After racing against David, we moved on to the finals. We sailed against Jack Egan, who had yet to lose a match. Jack Egan was a very strong competitor, and he was very good at watching the shifts. In total we raced five races against him. The first race was a resail because of a mix-up with the Race Committee. In the end, we won 3 to 1.
I know Jeffrey and Max were proud to win the Rose Cup because it was their final year of being eligible. As for Reade and I, we were super excited to win our first ever match racing event.
Thank you again so much for supporting me in this wonderful opportunity to sail, because this showed me how much fun match racing could be.