STANFORD, Calif. - Stanford sailing is coming off its best weekend of the year with three conference championship wins, including standout performances in the singlehanded championships from Luke Muller and Sally Mace. Now that the dust has settled, senior co-captain Haley Kirk took time to give her captain's update on how the team is doing both on and off the water.
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What has it been like being a captain so far?
It’s been good! It’s a lot more work than I thought it would be, but I’m really enjoying it. We have a really young team this year, which is fun. It’s a lot different than we’ve ever had. We had so many great seniors in a huge senior class last year that graduated, so it’s kind of a new shift having five seniors, eight freshmen, 10 sophomores and kind of a smaller junior class too. So it’s much heavier on the younger classes, which is good. It’s fun to be a captain and lead the team.
I talk about what we want to see changes in. And the freshmen are working really hard. And I think all the upperclassmen are really trying to help them out. There’s a lot that we expected they’d pick up quicker, but we have to remember, especially Kieran Chung and I as captains, that we have to let them know what the standard is and where we want them to be in the future. But I’m liking it. It’s really exciting. It’s nice to be up at the top and helping out younger people.
You’ve been sailing with your co-captain, Kieran, a lot. What has it been like spending so much time together?
It’s been great. I love Kieran. We work really well together. We love to sail, and we love sailing together. We try to keep captains’ stuff just to while we’re sailing out and haven’t started practice yet. Once practice starts, we’re doing that, and then at the end of the day, we’ll go back to whatever captain issues we need to deal with.
Has anybody come asking for any interesting non-sailing advice from you? Are people asking questions about classes or life in general?
Yeah! The freshmen have asked a good amount of questions about those things. I think Melissa, our academic advisor, is doing a great job helping them with classes and figuring that out. We always give our advice based on seasonal stuff. The winter is usually our heaviest load of academic work, fall is medium and spring is your lightest. So they ask about that, or how individual classes are. It’s nice to tell them about classes. We had a lot of engineers who graduated in the past. I’m a psychology major and political science minor, so not really in that realm, but a lot of our freshmen are doing more humanities work, or considering it at least. So I can give a little more insight into those classes, which has been fun, because I love those classes! I like talking about them.
What are you taking right now?
Now I’m in “Perception,” “Justice,” “Mediation” – which is great for captain stuff – and I’m taking a practicum at the Stanford Center on Longevity, which is really neat. It’s been good. It’s not too busy. The start of fall was hard because I was doing Kitchen Manager work and then starting up the season, but now it’s good.
Socially, it must be hard these first few weeks, because there is so much temptation on this campus. Everyone is out doing things. How do you manage it?
That’s something we try to help our freshmen with too. You have to find balance. You want to do school, sailing and social. It’s not just one of them. It’s definitely a hard thing to get used to in the beginning. Everyone starts to figure it out by about Week 5. By now, you’ve already had a test or two and a few papers. So if you haven’t figured it out by now, you might think, “Maybe I did that activity too much.”
