Charlie Buckingham and Leah Volk, two senior members of Georgetown’s sailing team, were invited to join the 2011 U.S. Sailing Development Team earlier this week.

The 55-person team, which is supported by U.S. Sailing’s Olympic Committee, trains young sailors to compete at the Olympic level.

Buckingham, who won the 2010 Intercollegiate Sailing Association men’s singlehanded national sailing championship, will train on a single-person dinghy known as a Laser. But, he’s no stranger to accolades; in 2009, he appeared in Sports Illustrated and was honored as the nation’s top collegiate sailor.

Volk was chosen for the 470, a two-person dinghy.

“In addition to competing in regattas against the best national and international sailors, the USSDT will participate in a number of training camps throughout the year including the Performance Enhancement Team Training Camp in Colorado Springs,” Head Coach Kenneth Andreasen said in a press release.

Buckingham and Volk aren’t the first Hoyas with gold-medal hopes. In 2008, Georgetown graduate Andrew Campbell competed at the Beijing Olympics.

Photos: Georgetown Athletics

Usually the only Georgetown athletes fortunate (or unfortunate, if you believe in the cover jinx) enough to see their name in Sports Illustrated are the University’s basketball stars. But this week SI’s editors showed that Hoya sports extend outside of the Verizon Center, featuring sailor Charlie Buckingham in the current issue’s Faces in the Crowd section.

Buckingham, who was featured in the Voice‘s cover story on the sailing team earlier this year, earned his place in the magazine by winning the Everett B. Morris Trophy as the nation’s top collegiate sailor. Only the second sophomore ever to win the award, Buckingham joins Andrew Campbell and Chris Behm as the third Hoya to take home the Morris Trophy in the past four years.

The rising junior skipper helped lead the Hoyas to a third-place finish at this year’s sailing national championships. With the collegiate sailing season concluded, Buckingham now hopes to bring home hardware for a new team: the USA. He will spend his summer with the US Sailing Team, travelling the world to compete in regattas.