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By Airwaves writer Margaret Boehm

“From my experience over the past four years they [Villanova school administration] have fought us tooth and nail over every little thing we try to do. The people in the athletics administration, along with the risk management department, know nothing about sailing and it terrifies them,” says Andrew Sayre, a senior and team leader on the Villanova University club sailing team. Sayre is among a small group of dedicated sailors who are trying to revive the team founded in the late 1970s, dormant through the 1990s and brought to life again in 2003. Sayre and his cohorts hope to build the team in number of sailors and dollar signs in the team treasury, but this will not be easy.

Under Villanova regulations, the team is not allowed to hire a paid coach. Ideally they are to find a faculty member willing to sponsor and coach the team. The search for a faculty advisor has been unsuccessful; “So far we have not been able to find a professor with enough free time and enough of a passion for sailing to be willing to make this commitment.” Being unable to find a faculty sponsor and/or coach has severely limited the enthusiastic team that is determined to grow. Villanova mandates that a coach be present at every practice and regatta. This makes it impossible to split up and attend multiple regattas in one weekend, as do most teams in their MAISA division, the Middle Atlantic Intercollegiate Sailing Association.

Each year, the team is given between $700-800. This amount does not even cover the leasing dues the team pays their home yacht club in order to use the facilities and the boats. The team supports themselves with member dues. Currently, the team is campaigning to raise $100,000 to be able to buy a fleet of boats and solidify a successful financial future for the team.

The team plans to organize fundraisers on campus to build awareness for the little known team, “most students at Villanova do not know that we have a sailing team.  This is something we are trying to change,” says Sayre. Sailors are also encouraged to wear team gear around campus.

Along with promoting awareness for the team on campus, team leaders have also built up the team’s presence online. The Villanova Sailing Team has both twitter and facebook pages and recently won the Intercollegiate Offshore Regatta video contest with one of the promotional videos they made the past year. The team was granted a $1500 prize for wining the video contest. Sayre and his teammates already have a big plan for the prize money. The Villanova Sailing Team was given a berth at the Charleston Intersectional in February. The team plans to send their volunteer coach Matt Newborn along with four sailors to the event. Unlike many teams who can fly from regatta to regatta, the team plans to make the 11-hour drive to Charleston. Despite the grueling drive ahead of them, Sayre is psyched for the opportunity to compete on a more competitive level, “We’re really excited to get the opportunity to sail against the top teams in an early season event like this. “

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As for building the small group, team leaders revamped the Villanova Sailing Team website, making it easier to navigate and adding a “recruitment questionnaire.” Thus far the team has been contacted by 14 prospective sailors, up from 1 sailor the previous year.

Despite their recent successes, the Villanova Sailing Team still has a difficult road ahead of them and they are hoping that if the team becomes more competitive the administration at Villanova will be more supportive of the team’s existence and its endeavors. “We really need to get the school on our side, or at least on the sideline and not against us,” according to Sayre. Fortunately, the students at Villanova are enthusiastic, “Other students are definitely supportive of the team, the problem is there is a general lack of knowledge about sailing as a sport within the school and on campus.  You tell someone you’re on the sailing team or that you have to go to sailing practice and the general response is “don’t you just sit in boats?”  Obviously this is something we are working on fixing and everyone on the team fully supports it.”