As a team captain and high-school team racing champion at Tabor Academy, Andy Horton had the skills and grades to get into and sail for most schools in the country. However, having grown up in northern Vermont and carrying a fairly thin junior-sailing résumé, he fell just below the radar of the few college coaches with the resources to recruit incoming talent. Rather than fight his way through the pack at a power school, Horton took a chance on a fledgling program and attended Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York.

"I like to work hard, and Scott [Iklé, HWS coach] said he could help out," Horton says. "I thought I'd have a better chance of doing what I wanted to do than if I went to a place where success is expected." Horton, who's now in the midst of an Olympic Soling campaign, sailed nearly every intersectional regatta HWS over for four years. He earned All-America honors three times and finished his career with a third-place finish in A Division at the 1998 Dinghy Nationals. He also played a key role in building what's now one of the stronger teams in the country, an experience that would've been difficult to find at a school that's been ranked in the top 20 for the past decade.

This is what lies behind the rankings and race results: the part of college sailing that's rarely written about but is for many the most memorable. Collegiate sailing has always depended on student involvement in the day-to-day operations both of individual teams and the ICYRA as a whole. Initially this was a necessity. Few teams had the money to hire a coach, even on a part-time basis, so everything from boat maintenance to regatta scheduling to running practices was done by the team members. During the last few decades, sailing has edged closer to other college sports in terms of funding and coaching. Even so, some of the programs with the funding to be run like a Division I football team still cling to the cooperative spirit upon which college sailing was built.

"Our team captains run tryouts," says coach Adam Werblow, whose St. Mary's College team is one of the better-supported in the nation. "It's our team captains who decide what's going to happen there. I do this because of my experience as a student at Connecticut College. We were a student-run team, and I thought there was some value in some of the things we did at Conn. I wanted to combine the best elements of both."