You may have noticed that the Roger Williams University sailing team has been killing it lately. The team most recently won the Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association Open Team Race National Championship; they also placed first in the open fleet race semi finals and advanced to finals, and women’s dinghy racing also put forth a a strong performance and made it to finals.

A big part of that it that the team has some great sailors, and great leadership in Head Coach, Amanda Callahan. Their location is pretty great too — the RWU Sailing Center (which is also now the home of US Sailing, the sport’s national governing body) is located on Mt. Hope Bay, a unique training ground, with shifty seas and winds, a very strong current, and a wide range of topography. The RWU waterfront enables sailors to train in a wide variety of conditions.

Just in time for the 2023-2024 season, RWU received the final piece of the puzzle that made this season such an outstanding one: a new fleet, courtesy of generous donors and manufactured by Bristol’s own Zim Sailing.

RWU received a $200,000 gift from the Donald C. McGraw Foundation, and donations from the Matthews family, the family of Todd Rechler, Class of 1993, and Bruce Lebens and Hunt Lawrence, that enabled the Sailing program to purchase a new fleet of 18 FJs and six 420s.

The donations that RWU received covered the entire fleet and they could have gone anywhere in the world to have the boats made, but it made sense to invest that money back into Bristol — especially considering that Zim is the largest manufacturer and distributor of small sailboats in North America.

“Roger Williams University’s Sailing program has grown to rival the biggest programs in the country, thanks to the heart and work ethic of our student-athletes, our national and international recruiting, and our campus’s unique waterfront training ground on Mount Hope Bay,” said John King, Vice President for Student Life. “This year, the generosity of our donors, the team’s commanding performance, Coach Callahan’s leadership, and our Sailing Center formed a powerful combination for success. We are deeply grateful to the support of the McGraw Foundation and our families that allowed us to purchase an entirely new fleet to replace the aging boats. Their generous philanthropy inspired us to invest the funds into our hometown community and Bristol’s world-class boat-building industry, and Zim Sailing was the perfect choice to build our new fleet.”

“We could not have done it without the donor support, it made a huge difference,” said Athletic Director Kiki Jacobs. “And Amanda is a great ambassador,” she said, noting that Callahan is the only female head coach of a co-ed varsity sailing team in the country.

For Callahan, the new fleet has had its biggest impact when it comes to maximizing the team’s time on the water.

“We sail our boats more than most people drive their cars, out four times a week for two and a half hour practices and weekend regattas,” said Callahan. “We had a fleet of 420s manufactured by a company north of Boston and we had a lot of struggles with them, some self-inflicted, but some structural.”

That fleet was falling apart by the end of last year, and according to Callahan, something was breaking every day, interrupting practice and taking sailors off the water.

According to Bob Adam, Director of Institutional Sales for Zim Sailing, it just made sense for RWU to come to them. “We were a logical choice — the college is in Bristol, the company is in Bristol and the boats are manufactured here,” he said.

Zim has about 90% of the market share of high school and college fleets, providing boats for top local high school teams like Portsmouth Abbey, St. George’s, and Tabor, as well as the best collegiate programs, including Brown, Harvard, and Yale (all of which were defeated by RWU at the Open Team Race National Championship this spring.)

According to Adam, Zim’s boats are dominant because they employ proprietary, proven construction methods that stand up to the rigors of college sailing, and they employ a team of skilled manufacturers, many of whom have years of experience from working at boat builders including Vanguard and Laser. “Or team has been doing this for a really long time,” he said.

“Now we have so much peace of mind; we can get through practice without interruptions,” said Callahan. “It’s especially nice when, on the rare occasion we do need something, Zim is right up the street. I call Bob and we have a solution before practice.”