Ken Legler: A good time to say goodbye

by Paul Sweeney, Tufts Athletics
After 43 years at the helm of the nationally-renowned Tufts University sailing program, Ken Legler retires following a career that has reached far and wide in the sport.

After taking over the storied Jumbo program in 1980, Legler guided Tufts teams to a combined 20 national championships across all of the college sailing disciplines. He coached three College Sailor of the Year honorees and 86 All-Americans, including four who become Olympians and many who won world sailing championships.

Legler himself is a 2019 inductee into the Intercollegiate Sailing Association (ICSA) Hall of Fame. His significance in the sport is underlined not only by his teams’ success, but also by the sportsmanship they displayed while winning.

“Ken is a legend,” said Fran Charles, a 1980 Tufts graduate who was a sailing team member and went on to a coaching career that included 31 years at MIT. “He’s worked tirelessly for Tufts, but also it’s really important to say that the Tufts sailors have always reflected his great ethical values on the race course. Even though they were fiercely competitive, the Tufts kids have also been the nicest competitors on the race course.”

To watch a tribute video to Coach Legler, click here.

Legler took over for fellow legend Joe Duplin as the Tufts coach and carried on what became known as the Tufts Sailing mystique. Competing against larger schools such as the U.S. Naval Academy and other traditional Division I teams, Tufts as a comparably small school become a national power.

“The competition at our practices is better than what we face at a lot of regattas because we have so many talented sailors,” Legler said at the time.

Legler also credits Jumbo All-American Manton Scott with helping to establish the team in the 1970s. Scott was killed tragically when he was electrocuted at a regatta in 1973, but had already enthusiastically spread the word about Tufts sailing to other young and talented competitors. Legler was one of them, and he wanted to sail at Tufts, but he went to the University of Rhode Island for financial reasons.

At URI, he was an All-American who won dinghy and team racing national championships. During his undergraduate years he took over as coach and was running the team – or trying to, he said. Upon graduation, he was already prepared for a coaching career.

Following a stint as an assistant coach at Navy, Legler earned his first head coach job at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy (Kings Point). He immediately guided the Mariners to the National Championship in 1979.

With Duplin retiring as Tufts’ coach in 1980, the job was open and Fran Charles was the student representative on the search committee. He said he recruited Legler hard while both were at the college nationals that year, knowing he would be a great fit.

“We were really impressed with the job he did at Navy and then Kings Point,” Charles said. “He was a really nice guy who was well-respected by competitors, and he understood the nuances of the most competitive style of racing at the top since he had played the game.”

After the Jumbos had won the 1980 Coed National Championship in Duplin’s final season, Legler in his first year as coach led the team to a second straight National Championship with a new group of starters in 1981. Legler’s Tufts teams would go on to win two more co-ed titles along with eight women’s, five team racing, two men’s singlehanded, one women’s singlehanded, and one match racing national championship.

The eight women’s titles – more than any other school in the country – is the achievement of which he’s most proud. Under his guidance, Tufts was the nation’s most prominent women’s team for two decades.

“They worked really hard for all of them,” Legler said as he reflected on the women’s national championships. “They had the goals and the training always went really well, and then we’d show up and we had better speed and better smarts than the other schools.”

Beyond his ability to teach the Jumbos how to win on the water, he also shared his pure joy for sailing with the team. Throughout his career he coached upwards of 1,000 sailors at Tufts. The number of regattas that the team competes at each year is the most of any college team in the world.

Though cutting the number of competitions would have lessened the administrative work that the busy schedule created for him, Legler strongly thought doing so would not have been in the team’s best interests.

“We could have had a smaller team and offered it to less people,” Legler said, “but that’s not an improvement in my mind. Why give this benefit to only half as many people? To me that would be a terrible thing.”

In 2013, Legler helped the University design and open the Bacow Sailing Pavilion on Upper Mystic Lake in Medford. Named and advocated for by former Tufts President Larry Bacow, himself a collegiate sailor at MIT, the three-floor facility greatly aided the team’s performance. It provided the ability to store and repair the team’s fleet along with space for the team to meet after practice which had never existed previously.

It’s always been about the students. In 2006, when he was being treated for stage four throat cancer, Legler showed up at Tufts’ annual Captains Luncheon while he was in the middle of radiation treatment. It was a display of courage and support for his athletes that did not go unnoticed by many in attendance.

Through a second bout with cancer, which has impaired his speech and ability to eat, and then a mild stroke in 2020, Legler persevered and returned to coaching as soon as possible.

“Ken instilled a true love of the sport in all of us,” said Senet Bischoff, the 1996 National College Sailor of the Year. “As a result, we never prioritized individual achievement over making the team better. And so many Jumbos continue to compete at the highest levels of the sport years and years after graduating.”

Legler’s achievements in coaching extend far beyond the Tufts campus. In the early 1980s he coached the US Sailing team part-time, and also coached at a number of international events such as the 1981 (France) and 1984 (New Zealand) 470 class world championships and the 1983 Pan Am Games (Venezuela).

He is also an award-winning race officer, an area in which he will continue to contribute. Among the many international regattas that he has administered, Legler has run Key West Race Week 23 times and this coming September will be the Principal Race Officer (PRO) for the International One-Design World Championships in Nantucket.

He has also been active as a judge, umpire, photographer, and race commentator. At his Hall of Fame induction, the ICSA honored him with the Campbell Family Award for Lifetime Service.

Legler also found the time to volunteer as a sighted guide for blind sailors, and competed at Blind Sailing World Championships in Italy (2002) and Newport (2006).

“When they do a Mount Rushmore for college sailors, Ken Legler will be there,” Josh Adams, a three-time All-American for the Jumbos and later director of US Olympic Sailing, said in a Sailing World tribute article. “As a coach, he’s more philosopher than technician.

“What he’s good at is getting sailors on the water to learn from being on the water. When you graduate Tufts and look back, you realize that all those practice days and all those practice races were led by an exceptional PRO. He’s made a difference in race management in America.”

Now he is able to celebrate a career that has been a part of five decades at Tufts. On May 13 of this year, more than 350 alumni and friends gathered for “Ken’s Epic Retirement Tribute” on campus. Among the gifts he received, it was announced that the trophy for the New England Women’s Team Racing Championship will be named in his honor.

“It was a little bit overwhelming,” Legler said. “I knew there would be a good turn-out, and I was psyched that there was even more than I expected. It got emotional.”

In Sailing World’s appreciation piece, Kimball Livingston wrote, “Ken Legler has inhabited the sailing world, pumped it through his veins and made a difference,” writes Kimball Livingston in Sailing World’s appreciation piece.

Tired of handling the administrative challenges of running the team out of the water, and perhaps frustrated a bit by the rise of the Ivy League teams in the water, now seemed like a good time. At 69 years old, he steps aside.

His future in the sport will range widely, from continuing to lead small local sailing clinics to running major regattas. Putting his expert weather forecasting skills to greater use as an option for current competitors is another idea floating around in his head.

Tufts has hired Johnny Norfleet, previously at Fordham University, as its next sailing coach.

In the Tufts Daily’s recent appreciation article, Legler concluded, “I like to think that I’m going to leave behind a team that sails for fun and enjoyment by being successful.”

That covers it.