The Cardinal picked up its first victory of the 2014-15 season with an undefeated performance at the Pacific Coast Collegiate Sailing Conference Match Racing Championship this weekend in San Diego.
In the match-race format, Stanford defeated UC Santa Barbara, Hawaii, USC, Long Beach State, UC Irvine and Cal for a 6-0 record and the team title. UC Santa Barbara finished in second place, only losing to the Cardinal.
Antoine Screve and Hans Henken skippered for Stanford, teaming up with Daniel Ron and Sammy Steele to form the undefeated Cardinal quartet. Henken and Steele were competing in their second event of the season after previously helping guide the Cardinal to a 15th-place finish at the Hatch Brown Trophy event at MIT last month, while the match race marked the 2014-15 debuts for Screve and Ron.
With strategy playing a key role in the match-race format, the Cardinal was in good hands. Henken and Screve are not only graduates of the U.S. Olympic Development Team, but they are also both engineering majors. Henken is a senior majoring in aeronautics and astronautics and Screve is a junior in mechanical engineering.
Stanford also sent a four-sailor contingent to the Danmark Trophy Regatta in New London, Conn., over the weekend. Co-captains Kieran Chung and Haley Kirk sailed together in division-A to lead the Cardinal to a 10th-place finish overall with help from a strong division-B performance from Reinier Eenkema van Dijk and Yuki Yoshiyasu.
Both boats finished strong in Connecticut. Chung and Kirk picked up Stanford's only individual race win of the weekend in the penultimate race of the regatta and Eenkema van Dijk and Yoshiyasu closed out their weekend with five consecutive top-six finishes, including five top-three results.
This weekend, the Cardinal will compete for the Moody Trophy in Wakefield, R.I., and participate in the Navy Fall Women's Interconference in Annapolis, Md. Live results will be available via scores.collegesailing.org.
