Cooper named in collegiate select team
Mackenzie Cooper, the Team BDA skipper at the Red Bull Youth America’s Cup, has been presented with another golden opportunity to broaden his horizons.
Cooper, who attends St Mary’s College of Maryland, has been named in a team of Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association sailors to compete at various regattas in different classes in Europe.
The ICSA is the governing body for sailing competition at colleges and universities throughout the United States and parts of Canada.
Cooper and his team-mates will take part in team racing events, which make up the biennial British Universities Sailing Association Tour, at three different venues in the UK before travelling to Italy for the LaserPerformance Collegiate Cup in Campione del Garda.
It will be Cooper’s second time competing at Lake Garda in three months having raced there for Team BDA at the GC32 Racing Tour’s Riva Cup in May.
“I’m looking forward to refreshing my team racing skills after the America’s Cup,” said Cooper, the son of Somers Cooper, the former Royal Bermuda Yacht Club commodore and Bermuda Sailing Association president.
“Team racing is a very tactical game and although it’s quite different I’m confident that the Red Bull Youth America’s Cup experience will have helped that.”
Cooper won a bronze medal competing for St Mary’s at the Intercollegiate Sailing Association Team Race National Championships in San Diego last summer and skippered Team BDA to the finals of the Red Bull Youth America’s Cup in June.
The BUSA Tour pits the best of ICSA against the best of BUSA in a tour-style format that includes matches in Lasers, double-handed dinghies and keelboats in Team Racing and Match Racing formats.
Cooper is the first Bermudian sailor to participate in the BUSA Tour since Emily Nagel, who captained the BUSA’s women’s team at the previous BUSA Tour event in 2015.
The LaserPerformance Collegiate Cup is designed to introduce college sailing to university-age students and academic institutions around the world and is contested in LaserPerformance’s double-handed Z420 dinghies.
