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Mass Maritime athletes keep games in their place

By Jim Seavey
For NCAA.org

Student-athletes at Massachusetts Maritime twice in the last month exhibited sportsmanship in ways that spoke volumes about their character, their training and the life skills they are learning.

The first episode involved senior women’s cross country captain Meredith Hall.

While competing for the Buccaneers in the Codfish Bowl Invitational on Sept. 25 in Boston, Hall was in the middle of her run along the 5-kilometer course when she came upon Brandeis senior Hannah Lindholm. Lindholm had stopped running, was holding her chest and having difficulty breathing. As it turned out, she was suffering an asthma attack.

Hall, an emergency-management major, stopped competing to assess Lindholm’s situation. Lindholm told Hall that she was fine and she should keep running.

But Hall was not convinced, and after taking one step forward, she took two steps back and stayed out of the race until she knew that Lindholm was going to be attended to by the medical staff.

In the process, she sacrificed both time and team standing. Hall, who has been one of the Buccaneers’ top performers throughout her career, was the second Massachusetts Maritime runner across the line with a time of 24:16, but that was good for only 153rd place although she was on a solid pace before stopping.

Lindholm was treated at the scene and soon was back on the Brandeis campus training for the remainder of her senior season.

“Anyone would have done the same thing,” Hall said. “I know she would have done the same thing for me.”

“It was really sweet and courageous that Meredith stopped to make sure I was all right,” Lindholm said. “I was at first surprised she stopped, as I had waved a couple of runners on and told them I was OK, but Meredith was so kind to me.”

Buccaneer coach Linda Letourneau praised her captain.

“True to her EMT training, Meredith did what she was trained to do, sacrificing her time, her overall place and the team’s standing to do it,” Letourneau said. “I can’t say enough positive things about the way she reacted and handled a difficult situation.”

Buccaneer sailing team rescues capsized vessel

The other case occurred Sept. 11 and involved nine members of the Buccaneer sailing team and their coach, Chuck Fontaine.

Christopher Morrow, Michael Powers, Jarrett Crosby, Graham Philpot, Jeffrey Gawrys,  Kristen Donnell, Stephen Moore, Kyle Mahaffey and Andrew Gregoire, along with Fontaine and 2009 Massachusetts Maritime graduate Mitchell Menard, were guiding the 43-foot Aerodyne Tango in the Quissett Round-the-Bay event near Woods Hole and were faring well in the race with a fifth-place standing at the 21-mile mark.

With Woods Hole in sight on the last leg of the race, the crew of the Tango saw a vessel upside down in the water about a mile off the coast. The vessel had been occupied by two recent graduates of the residency program at the UMass Medical Center.

“They were in the water wearing nothing but T-shirts and shorts with no lifejackets on,” Fontaine said. “They had capsized about 15 minutes earlier and were hanging on to the boat in rough water.”

After notifying race officials that Massachusetts Maritime was dropping out of the race, the crew sailed to the distressed boat, rescued the two stranded occupants and their vessel and returned to shore in Marion where the medical residents were met by friends and family and transported safely away. One occupant was a little tardy for his wedding rehearsal dinner that night but had quite an excuse to share with this bride-to-be.

The crew of the Tango never thought twice of doing anything but rescuing the capsized vessel.

“It would be natural for anyone to do it,” Gawrys said.

“It was just common sense to stop and help others that were in trouble,” Philpot added.

For Fontaine, the selfless act by his student-athletes speaks to a key core value that has always been a part of the Academy’s longstanding tradition: Doing the right thing.

For the student-athletes, the experience was overwhelmingly positive, from the standpoint of posting a top-five performance in a field of 20 schools in the competition to that of knowing that they would do the same thing every time.

But it was perhaps Powers and Donnell best summed up what the actions of the Massachusetts Maritime sailing team meant in the overall scheme of things:

“There will always be another race,” they stated.

It’s hard to imagine that there will be a more memorable one, though.

Jim Seavey is sports information director at Massachusetts Maritime Academy.