Orleans Native Wins Collegiate Sailing National Championship, Individual Award For Top Crew

Growing up on the Cape, Caroline Keeffe-Jones was always the skipper — the driver — when she sailed.

An Orleans native, Keeffe-Jones had only ever skippered when she arrived at Brown University freshman year and the sailing team coach promptly asked her to be crew, not skipper.

Sign me up was Keeffe-Jones’ reply. She just wanted to sail as much as possible, and feeling that her resume of sailing at the Orleans Yacht Club and for Nauset didn’t stack up with those of the rest of her fellow recruiting class, was ready to do whatever the team needed.

“I was just trying to learn as much as possible…and try and at least get to a medium level by the time I left was my goal freshman year,” Keeffe-Jones said. “I was freaking out.”

Four seasons later, it’s clear that Keeffe-Jones instead reached an elite level. Last month, Keeffe-Jones won the Mitchell M. Brindley Trophy, collegiate sailing’s award for the most outstanding crew of the year. The achievement was, for Keeffe-Jones in her senior year, the individual capstone to a national championship-winning season for Brown.

On May 22 in St. Petersburg, Fla., the Bears won the College Sailing Open Fleet Race National Championship. Keeffe-Jones and skipper Blake Behrens finished atop the event’s B Division by 24 points to help clinch the title, Brown’s first since 1948.

“It was so exciting and it was so relieving,” Keeffe-Jones said. “It was so stressful, like so close, trading back and forth every single race for those two whole days.”

Those days during the national championship were 10 hours long in blistering St. Pete heat. About halfway through the competition, the Bears ascended into first place, then traded that spot with Stanford, the defending champions, a couple times before claiming it for good. 

“There's so many different moving parts,” Keeffe-Jones said. “Makes it super stressful.”

The dominant performance of Keeffe-Jones and Behrens in the B Division plus a third-place finish in the A Division by Brown’s Guthrie Braun and Vera Allen clinched the victory, bringing the Henry A. Morss Trophy back to Providence.

To reach nationals, the Bears first won the Open Western National Semifinals that same week. Like the final competition that would follow, they finished above reigning title-winners Stanford in the qualifier. 

After the championship victory, Keeffe-Jones received the Mitchell M. Brindley Trophy as the top crew that year in college sailing. The award took her by surprise. In a short time, she had gone from coming fresh to College Hill having never crewed before to being named the best in the sport.

“I was just happy to be a finalist,” Keeffe-Jones said. “That was my goal, but to win is amazing and unexpected for sure.”

Along with eight other teammates, Keeffe-Jones was also named an Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association All-American (At Nauset, Keeffe-Jones was Cape and Islands League MVP in 2022 and a two-time All-Star). 

The Bears finished third in the running for the Leonard M. Fowle Trophy, given to collegiate sailing’s best overall program of the year, taking into account all of the sport’s several national championship events. Brown won the trophy in 2024 — Keeffe-Jones’ sophomore year — for the first time in three decades.

After graduating, Keeffe-Jones is spending the summer back in Orleans before moving to New York to work in finance. She already has plans to continue sailing competitively.