Rebecca McElvain ’19 loves sailing on Mascoma Lake. On the sailing team during college, she is now the women’s and open teams’ permanent head coach—the Ivy League’s first female and youngest head coach in the sport—with an all-female staff and the gorgeous new Tim and Barbara Michels Family Boathouse. It includes a barn for 22 boats. “They can get wheeled in, sails up, rigs up. It saves us a ton of time,” McElvain says. The well-designed facility offers a classroom with a video screen, heated locker rooms with clothes dryers, and floors with drains. The old boathouse, which McElvain fondly describes as “humble and gritty,” was often damp, with gaps in the floorboards that ate cell phones and key cards. But, she says, “we won national championships out of that facility, and we’d like to do the same out of this one.”
