2.0 newsletter June
We’re well and truly into the swing of the season now. Attached is our June newsletter. It's been a busy month with more to come! Click below to read the full update on this month!
2.0 Newsletter - Oct, NOv, Dec
Two national competitions right into a world championship! A short and intense training block had us feeling ready to tackle a fleet of 14 women’s team battling it out on the Waitematā.
NZ Open Match Race Nationals - 6th place
The Harken New Zealand Match Racing National Championships was a great opportunity to check in on how our training was going and where we needed to focus our attention in the lead up to Women’s Worlds! In all honesty 6th place wasn’t the result we were hoping for, especially having claimed 4 th place the year prior. But we were happy to see the progress we’ve made and to have the opportunity to measure up against our fellow kiwis. A big focus for our team has been to become more process and performance orientated rather than focusing on the result as we found this is often a trap that sailors can fall into. It was a great event with a whole lot of close racing. The highlight of the event for 2.0, was most definitely pulling off two penalty kills back to back in the round robin right on the finish line. Penalty kills and penalty offsets had been a major focus in our training over the month leading up to the Open Nationals. It’s been epic to see how much the overall fleet and in particular the Youth Programme teams have been improving, we are confident that the future of match racing in New Zealand is looking strong! Congratulations to the Champions also known as ‘coach boat racing’, which was comprised of three of our very own past and current coaches, who almost went undefeated for the whole event! (Zak Merton – Current YTP Coach, Reuben Corbett - previous YTP Coach, Guy Pilkington – the YTP coach before that).
NZ Women’s nationals - 3rd place
We battled it out for 3 full days of tight of tight racing on home waters and were stoked to have finished up the NZ Women’s Match Race Championships in 3rd place. Day one we started the Round Robin with a bang - quite literally, with our main halyard snapping and losing us a race we were comfortably winning. We moved on from this quickly and put together some good races. Day 2 we were stoked to finish the Round Robin on a high winning our last two matches. The points between the top 5 teams were tight with only 1 win between 1st and 5th place - leaving a lot of the standings to count back. We were matched up against USAs Vela Racing (currently ranked world #3) for the quarterfinals and were happy to make it through after some valuable learning, winning 3-1. Day 3 we were excited to be matched up against the current World Champions Pauline Courtois and her team ‘Match in Pink’ . We had a tight battle with them with a few penalty calls unfortunately not going our way. Therefore, losing to them 0-3. We felt like we improved each race and learnt from each mistake. In the Petite Finals, we race Anna Ostling’s WINGS team (world #2) and had an awesome tight battle against them which came right down to the last race with a close penalty offset finish, resulting in us just winning by half a boat length. We were so stoked to have had the opportunity to line up and learn from some of the best women’s match racing teams and were excited to carry the momentum into the Worlds which kicked off just a few days later. We knew the Worlds would be a whole new game with 14 teams from all over the world.
WRITTEN BY Megan Thomson