Strong winds propel Knights to wins
Clear Falls squad earns two titles from three events for best season in school history
With a top five finish in the Baker Cup over the Memorial Day weekend, the Clear Falls High School sailing squad put the finishing touches on the best season in school history.
Earlier in the season, Clear Falls dominated the Keelboat national championship – a co-ed doublehanded regatta – and the Mallory national championship, the first for any Texas high school sailing team since the foundation of the fleet racing trophy in 1930.
“It’s the oldest high school sailing trophy there is,” said Dane Byerly, a Clear Falls graduating senior. “It’s crazy.”
“It took a while for it to set in,” said Laura Masterson, another graduating senior for the Knights. “It was definitely humbling to finally earn something that we were working so hard for.”
The senior-laden Clear Falls squad spent much of their last month as high school students on the water at Lakewood Yacht Club, adjusting sails and riding the calm breezes. After winning the Keelboat and Mallory titles earlier in the semester, they prepped for the Baker Cup the week before the Memorial Day weekend adjusting sails and working as a team, much the same way they had spent a lot of their entire high school careers.
It was a hardworking, but fun-loving dynamic that accumulated over just five years of the team after being founded by three Clear Falls students: the class of 2014’s Olivia McAndrew and class of 2013’s Hannah Goethe and Hannah Hughes.
“It’s pretty cool,” said Hughes, in her fourth year as a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy. “When I was there, it was just who of my friends can come to a regatta so we can have enough people, but now [the team] is selfsufficient and has enough people to make each other better.”
And better they have become in just those five years, but it wasn’t easy.
“It’s a unique organization because we have kids who didn’t grow up in a yacht club, didn’t grow up sailing their whole lives… And those kids are getting to compete now,” said Clear Falls sailing coach Chase Shaw. “But the formulas are working out, the chemistry on the team is working out. These kids have a lot of drive and passion.”
Byerly, 18, explained that upon joining the team his freshmen year, there were quite a bit of hurdles even to understand the sport before being athletically capable.
“When I first started sailing, I remember I wanted to quit because it was so confusing, but you just have to push through the barriers of sailing at first,” said Byerly. “It’ll be a little confusing, a little boring, a little flustering at first, but after that, it’s just crazy to experience sailing.” The Baker Cup From choppy conditions at the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend to limited weeks at the end, the Baker national championship was a challenging regatta to say the least.
Despite those conditions, out of eleven teams, the Clear Falls squad came out in the top five.
“We finished tied for fourth, so I’m pretty proud of these guys,” said Shaw. “They performed really well, and throughout the regatta, you could really tell we were improving each race with communicating more and anticipating what [each] teammate was going to do.”
Shaw was quick to credit the entire community for helping his team compete.
“The program wouldn’t be possible without individual sponsors and the help of the community,” he said. “To make it to where the program is now we have also had tremendous help from sponsor companies like Volvo Penta and KO Sailing, just to name a few. Working for our next national title, we will have to reach out to big organizations to drive our program forward.”
Masterson, 18, said that though the Baker Cup was difficult, a lot was learned by the end of the weekend.
“Coming into this regatta, we were one of the top contenders for the [Bakers] trophy and even though we couldn’t come up on top, I believe we did an excellent job of sailing as a team and understanding what was going on in the race course,” said Masterson.
Though they may not have won like they had wanted, Hughes, 21, was still extremely impressed with the way the team has improved from the days she sailed for the Knights.
“It’s pretty incredible that they don’t have anyone to really sail against to practice,” said Hughes. “But they are going to qualifiers, without practicing as much as the other good competition, and making a pretty big rep-