Rising Stars of American Sailing

Top juniors sailors are excelling across many classes today and Gary Jobson highlights his All-Star Juniors for Sailing World magazine.

American sailors excelled at the Youth Sailing World Championships this past December in Mussanah, Oman. The impressive performances inspired me to revisit our Jobson Junior All-Star ­recognitions, which we introduced in 2001.

Our roster of 141 All-Star ­candidates (ranging from 13 to 18 years of age) reads like a Who’s Who of top sailors over the past two decades. In 2001, Andrew Campbell, Molly Carapiet, Clay Johnson, Paige Railey and her brother Zach were on the list.

Since that first year, many others continued on to amazing careers, including Olympic sailors Caleb Paine, Charlie Buckingham, Stephanie Roble, Thomas Barrows, Joe Morris, Annie Haeger, Briana Provancha, and Graham Biehl. Others have won national championships, including Harry Melges IV, Vincent Porter, and Taylor Canfield. Two-thirds of the sailors were selected as All-Americans in college.

In 1921, the Sears Cup was created specifically for young sailors. Once upon a time, there were few high-level events for American youth sailors, but today there are dozens of major events across the country, which only makes our final selection all the more challenging.

My quest to embrace a cross section of talented American sailors started with a list of more than 400, and here we present the finalists. Like those who came before them, I fully expect we’ll be reading about this year’s All‑Stars in the coming years, so let’s get to it. – Full report