The 2016 winner of the S1D Coach of the Year, presented by Henri-Lloyd, is St. Mary’s Director of Sailing Bill Ward. This award is determined by you, our readers. We only choose from submitted nominations!! We had MANY outstanding candidates, and this year was, by far, the most difficult year to choose.
Bill Ward joined the St. Mary’s sailing coaching staff in the fall of 2006 as the assistant coach. However, his official title has changed to the Director of Sailing. In nearly 15 years of collegiate coaching, Ward’s teams have won five national championships. He also had the honor of coaching Team USA at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. In 2008, Ward was also named the National Coach of the Year by the U.S. Olympic Sailing Committee. He was also on the coaching staff of the U.S. Sailing Team for the 2007 Pan Am Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Ward served as the team leader/head coach for the U.S. Inter Collegiate Sailing Association Team competing in the BUSA Tour in 
England and Ireland in 2005. He graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. in 1996, where he was a two-time All-America honorable mention (1994 and 1995) and team captain. Ward led Georgetown to the program’s first-ever appearances at the ICSA Dinghy and Sloop National Championships. Bill’s nomination included the following letter and video from a player on the St. Mary’s squad:
I would like to follow up with my nomination for Bill Ward as coach of the year. Having been involved in college sailing for five years with two top sailing programs, I have experienced all levels of coaching. I have experienced ineffective coaching techniques firsthand and have witnessed many different strategies. Throughout all of this, Bill Ward has stood out as one of the best coaches in college sailing. He has been able to stay motivated year after year leading to reach the podium of team race nationals all most every year. He has been able to develop a technical training program and with his detailed guidance after every race or drill, his sailors are able to become some of the best sailors in the country year after year. Bill always knows where things went wrong and seems to always say the right thing. He is aware of when it is the time for a lesson and when it is time to keep things light and move forward. I know that if I was starting a sailing team today, I would hand pick Bill Ward to be the coach.
This is a video about the St. Mary’s Sailing Team’s 2016 Season and is dedicated to their coach Bill Ward for his dedication to create a title winning team. Featured in the video are skippers: Markus Edegran, Alex Curtiss, Mackenzie Cooper, and Carolyn Smith. Crews: Shelby Jacobs, Pat Tara, Greer Wattson, and Julia Monro.
The team competed this spring in the 2016 Intercollegiate Sailing Association’s three spring national championships – Sperry Women’s National Semi-Final and Final Championship, LaserPerformance Team Race National Championship, and the Gill Coed Dinghy National Semi-Final and Final Championship – held May 24-June 3 on San Diego Bay in San Diego, CA.
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About the Award
Sail1Design annually seeks your nominations for the Henri-Lloyd S1D Coach of the Year, for a coach that embodies the qualities (and more) listed in the article below. Sailors, this is your award! The Sail1Design staff chooses the winner only from our readers nominations! This is a great opportunity to recognize a coach that you feel makes a difference!
Henri-Lloyd generously supplies the winning coach with a new HL Jacket, and a $500 gift card for Henri-Lloyd Online, to shop and get some of the worlds best sailing technical gear.
All good coaches, regardless of their chosen sport, share some important fundamental qualities that transcend technical knowledge, or specific x’s & o’s. In other words, whether it’s a basketball, tennis, hockey, football, chess, or sailing coach, there are certain key characteristics to good coaching, and none of these really requires technical knowledge of the sport they are in.
Here are some of those characteristics: logistics, organization, energy, leadership, passion, creativity, patience, dedication, motivational skill, humility.
I would bet that you could take a good coach, put him or her in a new sport, and that coach would find some success. Think about the best coach you ever had, and visualize that person in another sport, and you might see just how that person could adapt and still be a difference-maker.
However, we all know that great coaches not only possess these core qualities, but indeed they are also masters of the subtleties, rules, and technical chess moves of the sport they are involved in. Very often, great coaches are former players themselves, and often they are good, but not necessarily great players. In any event, it seems virtually certain that actually having been in the arena at some level, having been a true game player, is a necessary ingredient for a great coach.
So then, what an important advantage sailing coaches have, since the sport allows lifelong top-level competitive opportunities. While it would be impossible for a middle-aged football coach to live, first-hand, what his players go through on the gridiron, middle-aged sailors and coaches can stay current, and can compete right alongside the world’s best sailors, and even win world championships in sailing. Opportunities exist in team racing, match racing, and all types of one-design classes offer regattas, year-round. In this manner, sailing coaches have the ability to get inside the sport, at the highest levels, learn more, and feel the same things that their players go through out on the race course. The empathy gained here is a very powerful tool that great coaches employ when coaching.
Getting into the rhythm of a sailboat race, realizing first-hand the excitement and frustrations of the sport, preparing mentally for each race, “knowing when to tack”, these are all things that coaches must be able to talk to their players about, and talking to them about these things is so much more clear and present when done by someone who is actually good at them, and has done them recently at a high level.
For example, it was always easy for me to say to a team, “make sure when you are in FJ’s at the starting line to allow yourself more leeward room to accelerate since the foils are small and the boats need to go bow down first before they start lifting.” It was really easy to say. It was quite another thing to actually do it, and to go out on the starting line, in FJ’s, and practice what I preached. That was a LOT harder, and I drew a great deal of empathy with my players from that situation and recognized better ways to talk about it and to talk them through it, having been there myself. This is especially true in team racing, where coaches can see plays easily on the coach boat or on the drawing board, but it’s one thing to talk about a mark trap at Mark 1; it’s another thing altogether to go out and be able to execute it. Without being, or having been, in the arena, sailing advice and technical coaching can be somewhat hollow compared to other sailing coaches who know it first-hand and live what they coach.
So, when you look to your coaches for advice or to get to that next level, or if you are a interested in sailing in a college program, take a moment and check out the coaches resumes, just as they will most assuredly be checking yours. The list that makes coaches good coaches should be there for sure, but see if the coaches list how, or if, they stay current in their profession and have the passion to go out on the racecourse themselves. Great coaches usually always have a story, and very recent one, of a lesson learned at a regatta they sailed in themselves. They love to sail and get better, if only to become a better sailor and coach.
While there is a short list of coaches who choose to (and can) do it all, many top collegiate programs now share these coaching qualities by hiring an assistant or co-head coach, who is very often a recent college sailing alumnus and is active in dinghy racing and brings that empathy, right away, to the team. The head coach then ties everything together with experience, maturity, management, and knowledge of the game.
If you’ve ever noticed, baseball coaches actually suit up for games even though they certainly won’t be playing. This historically comes from the old “player-coach” model, and perhaps, this connects them with the game and the player more intimately. Sailing offers the unique ability for all ages to compete at the highest levels of the sport, and great sailing coaches take advantage of this, “suiting up” themselves and making themselves better at coaching by sailing competitively.
Past S1D Coach of the Year Winners
2016- Bill Ward
2015- Frank Pizzo
2014- Chris Dold
2013- Steve Hunt
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Photo, left: “Playing Hearts” at KP, ICSA Women’s Nationals, circa 1987. Ken Legler (Tufts), Brad Dellenbaugh (Brown), KC Fullmer (Northwestern), Gary Bodie (Naval Academy). I think the two women sailors are Northwestern team members. “Pretty sure I shot the moon and won in a walk off”
Do you still sail competitively? If yes, how, when, and where? If your answer is “I don’t”, then do you miss competing, or does it not bother you?
All three teams deserve this award. In the end, among many other highlights, it was St. George’s perfect, undefeated record at the Team Race Nationals that made them stand apart, along with an undefeated 
I would like to nominate St. George’s School of Middletown, Rhode Island for the High School Sailing Team of the Year. While there are numerous factors that would and could qualify this team for such an award singly, the combination of them all makes a very strong case. This is an incredibly deep team in terms of talent and experience. In a daily practice environment, Coach 
Cape Cod Academy senior Meg Wilson had a lot to say about Wianno Yacht Club in Osterville, home to CCA’s varsity sailing team. “The wind conditions generally settle around 5-12 knots in the spring but there are always lighter days. It is easy to understand the patterns of oscillations of the wind here and use them to our advantage on the race course. Cape Cod Academy owns both a fleet of c420s and a fleet of FJs.”
One of Tabor Academy’s senior crews, Max Williams, had similar knowledge to offer about sailing conditions there. “Buzzards Bay has a history of being a windy venue. When the wind is blowing from the south, the southeast, or coming from the mouth of the harbor, one needs to protect the right especially because righties always come in. Even if the puffs are to the left, the ones who get right often fair better. The wind this year was very strange, there were many pressure drops and crews had to be extra careful not to over flatten during tacks because there are so significant ones even in big breeze.” Having sailed at Tabor myself, I can definitely attest to Max’s experiences there. At this year’s O’Day Qualifier at Tabor, wind conditions were so extreme that there were capsizes and breakdowns occurring every race.
factor here, and sailors should know the tide schedule so that they can predict how current will affect their starts and mark roundings. The team’s fleet of 12 z420s is just one year old, and the sails have only been used for about a month. As with all z420s, they are faster and more responsive than c420s, and crews are able to sit farther forward in the boat. In the summer, wind conditions in Duxbury change drastically, with most days very light or moderate breeze.
Boating, you could sail in either c420s or Cape Cod Mercuries. The latter boat is very different from any racing boat other programs use and is built more like a keelboat than a dinghy. Just up the river at MIT, sailors might sail in either an FJ or Firefly. Fireflies are similar to 420s, with the crew sitting facing the mast, but lacking jib cleats, just like in an like an FJ. They roll hard, and crews need to trim the jib slowly coming out of tacks to get maximum speed.
Ken Legler is an icon in the sailing and coaching community. This editor humbly suggests that Ken is one of the most knowledgeable, dedicated people that has ever graced the sailing community. As a Tufts grad, I will admit that I may well not be objective, but I was a hockey player at Tufts, and still his influence reverberated around campus when I was there. Few have had greater dedication, vision, success, and willingness to counter the current than Ken, (carbon mast Larks!) and the few times I sailed Larks at 
at should this event be sailed in?
ON COLLEGE SAILING
PERSONAL STUFF
Adam Werblow will be entering his 28th season as the head coach of the 
In short, I love it! If I were to win the lottery tomorrow, I would be back with the Seahawks the next day (ok–maybe there would be a wild bender first, but I’d be back within days). I believe in small class sizes and an enriching environment for students to explore their intellectual selves. As The Public Honors College for the State of MD, St. Mary’s is set in an idyllic setting on the water. In this manner, St. Mary’s provides an academic utopia for motivated athletes that is really unique. The Chesapeake has beautiful long fall and spring seasons making it ideal place to train for College Sailing. Our central location amongst the most prestigious hosting venues means that the major national regattas are often in our backyard.
Race 18B, for the championship, saw Yale, Georgetown and CGA all in the lead pack off the line with BC looking slow on the wrong side of the course. Nikole Barnes showed the blistering speed she has exhibited all season and ran away with the bullet. Georgetown hung on to a 3 for the win and Yale turned in a 5 to round out the top 3.
Many women made clear that the Sperry Women’s Championship event and women’s events in general prove to be some of the most rewarding experiences of being on their teams. Hope Wilson, a graduating senior on the Dartmouth sailing team, had time to reflect on her years on the women’s team. Hope said “My favorite part about being on this team is definitely the people. We have such an awesome group of people who are always excited about getting better every day, so it is hard not to have a good time with all of them.” Hope later reflected on the laughs shared within the women’s team and the irreplaceable experience women’s sailing has been for her.
Sammy started her sailing career at age five in the “Starfish” program at Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club (BCYC) in Corona del Mar, CA. She raced her first regatta at seven and was soon Sabot racing throughout Southern California. Sammy graduated from Sabots to C420s and CFJs, club racing for BCYC and as a varsity member of the Corona del Mar High School Sailing Team, where she helped the Team win the 2016 Pacific Coast Championships. Sammy is a volunteer coach at BCYC, aspiring doctor, and rising junior at Corona del Mar High School. You can reach Sammy at 
Everyone defines sportsmanship a little bit differently. In an interview Dave Perry defined sportsmanship as saying, “It’s an attitude of respect for the game, the rules, the people you’re racing against and the officials. Respect means you go about your job of competing fairly within the rules and try your hardest to win, without doing anything that is unfair to others.” This definition of sportsmanship is spot on. In sailing we are always trying to win the race, but in doing so we must compete fairly. Not only does sportsmanship mean we compete fairly, but we show respect towards our, competitors, teammates, and race committee. Sportsmanship is the fundamentals of sailing that every sailors needs to follow and enforce.
Paul Elvstrom, a famous Olympic sailor once said, “You haven’t won the race, if in winning the race you have lost the respect of your competitors.” This famous quote on sportsmanship is the essence of sailing. Sailing is a sport where you only win when you respect all aspects of the sport. We ourselves must monitor and protect the integrity of sailing. Sportsmanship is the foundation of the rule book, with the key components being; take your penalty turn even if no one saw what happened, or the boat you foul doesn’t protest you, enforce the rules, be respectful to your competitors, teammates, and race committee, and be a role model. Lets keep sailings integrity, and remember the next time your on the water the key components of sportsmanship!