Loyola Academy Sailing team kicked off their spring season on Tuesday via zoom, covering mostly strategies on how to improve on the racing style known as “Team Racing” as well as recapping how the fall season went, and how the spring season will go

The spring 2020 season was canceled right as it had started to ramp up which was disappointing for the team, and for most of the summer, it was unknown whether or not the fall season would continue as planned.

In the fall of 2020, Loyola coach and president of Sheridan Shores Sailing School (the facility in which the Loyola team practices) was able to organize practices and in house regattas with only the very close local teams of Beacon Academy and Evanston Township High School.

MISSA (Midwest interscholastic sailing association) refused to hold any regattas for most of the season due to covid concerns as most regattas require teams to travel out of state every weekend and would not follow covid guidelines set by most states in the district.

Loyola showed promising results during the fall season having a boat finish top 3 every weekend during the Sheridan shores race weekends according to head coach and organizer of the racing Zac Hernandez. Loyola attended the Shepard Championships as well, which was the only league regatta hosted in all of 2020, in which Loyola finished in third place in what is considered to be, by the captain of the Evanston sailing team Mary Castellini, “the most competitive sector of the midwest.”

Tuesday’s zoom consisted of an advanced talk about the racing style of Team racing. The sailing style most commonly used at regattas works a lot like a car race where the person who crosses the finishing line first gets first place and the second person gets second and so on, this style is called fleet racing and it can have anywhere from 3 to 300+ boats in a race.

In contrast, team racing consists of six boats total from two teams and works “a lot more like a game of chess” says varsity sailor Lexi Chigas, a Junior at Loyola. Like chess, it consists of “having boats placed strategically around the course in order to block other boats from opposing teams and then be able to move past the other team in order to win,” continues Chigas.

Unlike the game of chess, some team races can be spread out over multiple miles of course, and the only way team members can communicate with each other is by yelling across the course to each other. This is in contrast to fleet racing where sailors rarely talk to other boats on the course and keep hushed voices in order to talk to their partners in the boat so no one knows their plans.

Sailors at Loyola are not sure how the spring season will pan out and are some are keeping low expectations expecting little to no regattas.