THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT A REGATTA

The Boston College Sailing Team is one of those programs that tells its story in triplicate. On paper, in pixels, and in league standings, the same weekend regatta becomes three different narratives, each calibrated to its audience. The Athletics website, with its staccato datelines and recitations of scores, could pass for the financial section of the Globe. Instagram, meanwhile, gives us smiles, emojis, and the Charles River blue that looks almost Photoshopped. External sailing association reports, like those from NEISA, don’t bother with adjectives at all: they serve raw numbers, rankings, and no garnish. Taken together, these platforms create a composite identity of Boston College Sailing—equal parts professionalism, community, and competitive grit. What makes this storytelling fascinating is not just the platforms themselves but how the athletes recognize what’s gained and what’s lost in translation.
The Athletics site reads like an official record carved into digital marble. Each release begins with “CHESTNUT HILL, Mass.,” as if the team’s triumphs require coordinates for posterity. The prose lists who sailed, where they finished, and points tallied. One recap detailed how Boston College (BC) “secured two top-15 finishes in the NEISA Open Singlehanded Championship Monotype Trophy, fourth-place finishes in the Barnett Trophy, seventh place in the Hatch Brown Trophy, and an eighth-place finish in the Regis Trophy” (Boston College Athletics, “Eagles Earn Multiple Top-Ten Finishes”). This is rhetoric as logos—statistics that establish legitimacy. Yet the sheer density of names transforms the article into something more: a democratic archive where every sailor, not just the star, receives recognition. It’s an ethos-building move, signaling that the program values inclusivity as much as victory. Freshman skipper Jake Homberger praised this function, observing that the site “highlights everything about each regatta in a good way” and ensures that even lesser-known events are documented. But there’s a catch. The site’s commitment to completeness can flatten the narrative, reducing regattas to ledgers of finish placements. It captures the what, not the why, leaving culture and emotion adrift.
Instagram, by contrast, is all mood and motion. “Smooth sailing and big smiles,” one caption beams, beneath a shot of two sailors leaning into the wind with the composure of seasoned athletes but the faces of kids who just cracked an inside joke (@bcsailing). Here the rhetoric shifts to pathos: the images invite us not to measure points but to feel the joy, camaraderie, and Boston skyline sunsets that make the sport more than standings. Emojis do the heavy lifting of tone. But Instagram has its blind spots. “Usually, there’s multiple events in a weekend,” Homberger explained, “and one of the events is definitely more important … like a qualifier for the national championship. I would try to highlight that more just to give the people credit they deserve.” His critique reveals the platform’s rhetorical trade-off: in chasing vibe, it sometimes ignores gravity. Where the Athletics page over-documents, Instagram underplays, reducing monumental qualifiers to the same narrative weight as a sunny practice sail. Still, Instagram excels at mythmaking—it captures belonging, even if it blurs where competition ends and community begins.
Finally, there are the New England Intercollegiate Sailing Association (NEISA) reports, which feel less like stories than scorecards tacked onto the sailing world’s bulletin board. They list placements, divisions, and final tallies with the austerity of tax returns. In the full scores for the Monotype Trophy – NEISA Open Singlehanded Championship, Jake Homberger’s sequence of finishes (7, 3, 2, 8, 1, 1, 10, 7, 4, 6, 8 → total 57) reads like a string of data points, while teammate Tor Svendsen’s finishes (9, 9, 3, 15, 10, 6, 31, 15, 12, 14, 17 → total 141) show the volatility of competition (NEISA, “Monotype Trophy Full Scores”). These numbers give no hint of the struggle, adjustments, or weather conditions that shaped the regatta. In that sense, the NEISA report functions as a pure logos text: it presents results without narrative flair or emotional framing. Yet in their very dryness lies their rhetorical power. These reports appeal to logos in its purest form—unfiltered evidence of where BC stacks up against Yale or Harvard. They are the texts that matter most to rival programs, future recruits, and, perhaps quietly, to the athletes themselves. Homberger admitted that seeing race results online is gratifying: it validates the labor behind the numbers, the early mornings and late lifts that Instagram can only hint at. Still, the reports cannot carry culture. They don’t tell us that BC’s “very, very strong” team ethos, as Homberger described it, is the envy of rival programs, or that sailors push each other in the classroom as much as on the Charles. They prove that Boston College Sailing is good; they cannot show us why.
Boston College Sailing’s story is a study in fragmentation. The Athletics recaps prove competence but lose texture; Instagram radiates spirit but downplays stakes; NEISA rankings certify legitimacy but erase the human effort behind it. Together, these narratives expose both the power and the fragility of representation. For smaller programs, the way they’re seen determines whether they’re seen at all. That dependence on rhetoric—on being legible to administrators, peers, and recruits—is both their strength and their vulnerability. Boston College Sailing exists in the tension between image and reality, working to stay visible in a university ecosystem that privileges louder sports. Its story, incomplete on any one platform, ultimately shows that meaning isn’t found in results—it’s built in how those results are told.