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By Airwaves writer Lydia Whiteford

Upon entering high school or college sailing, most crews who have been sailing for a while are very familiar with the Club 420. However, if these crews are coming out of club sailing, it can suddenly become a different boat altogether when it is stripped of its trap and spinnaker rig. Then, a variety of different other dinghies, sometimes unique to certain schools themselves, suddenly pop up in collegiate sailing and crews have to learn these boats as well as any other. In this article, I’ve compiled a list of helpful tips to assist new college crews in adapting to the number of different boats they may face in their careers.

420s: There is a surprisingly large difference, technically, between crewing in a club 420 rigged with a spinnaker and trap and one rigged for high school and college sailing. The biggest difference is that the boats are often heavier, with some venues filling the rails of all their boats to minimize damage in collisions. Also, collegiate races are shorter than club races, so boat handling really becomes important to going fast as opposed to just straight-line boat speed. Therefore, the biggest thing for crews who are used to sailing club boats to get used to is the boat handling. Roll tacking a 420, in particular, can be a deadly weapon and can guarantee good boat speed especially in conditions where the wind is limited. Because good roll tacking is mostly dependent on timing, my advice is to develop a practice with your skipper in which you can count down to a roll. A simple “ready to tack” followed by a “3…2…1…tacking” is the best way to get this started, and eventually you will be so practiced that the timing will become muscle memory. 420s are often the easiest boat to adapt to, because most crews coming into college sailing are already familiar with them.

FJs: FJs are arguably the most sailed dinghies in college sailing. Because of all the schools with venues that are on lakes or rivers, FJs are usually the boat of choice. Crewing in an FJ is vastly different from crewing in an FJ, starting with the fact that while sailing upwind the crew sits backwards. This can be difficult to get used to, but it is something you should do the first time you get into an FJ so you can start practicing immediately, even though it is tempting to sit forwards the first couple of times. The major benefit of sitting backwards is that the crew is now facing the skipper, so timing for maneuvers is easier to coordinate if you can look at your skipper or crew throughout the whole thing. Also, an FJ roll tack or roll jibe should feel a lot snappier than a 420, as the boats are more tippy and maneuverable. A 420 roll tends to involve your entire body to achieve the same feeling that a properly timed shoulder snap can give you in an FJ.

            The second biggest thing to get used to when crewing in FJs is that the leads for the jib are adjustable, and they don’t cleat. The jib is much bigger, so it is more important in these boats to be able to ease and trim constantly to achieve top speed. However, because you cannot cleat your jib it is easy to not have it trimmed correctly. My best advice on this is to play around in practice and make sure to inspect your jib whenever you make a change. Once you can see what easing, trimming, or moving the leads does to the jib shape, it is easier to recognize when it looks correct or when it looks bad and adjust it accordingly.

Vanguard 15: While, admittedly, this is not a boat sailed often in college regattas; it is a favorite off-season dinghy of many college sailors, including myself. V-15s are an excellent opportunity for sailors who want to keep their skills sharp when they’re not in season, as the class has most of its regattas over the summer months or in the winter. They are a lot like college dinghies, but they also introduce some aspects of higher performance dinghies with their adjustable stay-masters. The biggest challenge for crews in a V-15 is the hull shape. It is extremely shallow, so foot and body placement can be tough for those who are used to the shape of a 420 or FJ that has plenty of legroom. Unfortunately, if there is light wind this means a lot of squatting and a lot of balance, but with enough practice you can find a spot that is comfortable for your legs, and this spot will be different for every crew. The hull is also wide, so it can be difficult to cross without the leverage that the deeper-hulled boats offer for your legs. The best way I’ve found to solve this problem is to hook my foot under the far hiking strap instead of the near one, that way my body covers more distance and I don’t lose my balance as easily. Also these boats have dagger boards instead of centerboards, so extra planning downwind to handle a board that you can’t lower with a line will often pay to avoid getting stuck with the board up.

Other: This may seem like an odd category, but there are actually boats in college sailing that you will find in one venue and probably never see again once you graduate. The Larks at Tufts and Fireflies or Techs at MIT are a few examples, as well as the new Collegiate 420 that will soon replace the old boat we love so dearly. These boats often times cannot be mastered, unless you go to the school where they have them and practice them everyday. However, there are things you can think about before stepping into any dinghy to help you figure out the best way to crew in them. Do a couple of tacks as soon as you get on the water with your skipper. Is it more comfortable to sit forward or backwards, based on where the jib leads are? Should you do a really hard roll tack like you would in a 420, or do the boats require more of a load and flatten technique? These are questions that you should be asking yourself and your skipper before any race starts, so that you can be prepared for quick maneuvers during a race. Also, some boats have their rigs set up differently from what you can be used to with 420s and FJs. For example, both Larks and Fireflies have the vang rigged to the skipper for easy adjustments and the centerboard rigged so that you hoist it close to the mast. This is why, if you have never sailed or even seen a particular boat before, it is important you try to rig it yourself so that you can become at least a little familiar with it.

The bottom line is, any boat can go from alien and awkward to (pardon the pun) a breeze to sail with enough practice. If you are faced with a boat you are not comfortable in, make sure to try and get lots of maneuvers in during a practice, especially in the areas you are most uncomfortable, like jibes or tacks. If it is a situation where you will not get to practice in the boat until the regatta, then communication between you and your co
ach and you and your skipper can go a long way to cohesive sailing in an unfamiliar boat. 

By Airwaves contributor Maggie Hale

Is Allowing Cooperative HS Sailing Teams Beneficial or Detrimental to the Growth (and Success ) of High School Sailing?

On November 24^th, I attended the NESSA Annual Meeting where the topic of Cooperative Teams was on the agenda.  Cooperative teams are comprised of students from more than one school, and are usually the result of a school not having enough sailors to form its own team.  Cooperative teams are not allowed at the ISSA level, and have to be specifically allowed to compete at district regattas. 

I am not going to lie – I was shocked to see that a proposal on cooperative teams was brought to the membership at the NESSA annual meeting.  I was shocked because if you look at the eligibility rules in the ISSA Procedural Rule book, they are very clear.  (See bottom of this article for the full Procedural Rules on Eligibility from the ISSA.)There are many details, but the important piece is this: “Teams (students) may not combine with teams (students) from another school to form a team.” That one line puts the kibosh on mixed, cooperative, combined -or however you want to put it- teams.

The Procedural Rules are “mandatory for all National Competition but may be modified,as stated below, by District Associations in the interest of providing increased opportunity for participation.”In other words, districts may allow cooperative teams in local events.  And many districts do provide countless opportunities for developing and cooperative teams to compete. This exception to the ISSA rule exists to ensureno one is being left out or excluded from racing opportunities at the district level. However, if that is the case, why do we have teams in NESSA saying they are being excluded from racing opportunities?

At the NESSA Annual Meeting, the proposal to allow cooperative teams prompted lengthy discussion and debate amongst the membership.  (To see the full proposal, see the bottom of the page.) In NESSA, we are “obsessed with Team Racing,” as long-time St. George’s coach, Roy Williams, put it.  To field a team racing team you MUST have six sailors, and really, that doesn’t even cut it, since we all know it is rare you have every sailor at every practice.  Even then, three boats does not allow for any real race practice, so you must then have twelve sailors at every practice so that you can have a minimum of six boats on the water.  For teams to have six competent, safe skippers and six competent, safe crews, forming a productive team becomes a much greater challenge.

On top of needing 12 sailors to have a team, the pro-cooperative teams side was expressing how difficult it is for them to schedule the spring season with the way the NESSA ranking system works.  If an eligible school races a non-eligible school, those races do not count towards the ranking of the eligible school.The rankings are of utmost importance to teams looking to secure a berth to the district championships that qualify you for the nationals. As a result, cooperative teams were reporting that they were having trouble finding teams to race against.They continued by adding because their teams are not allowed to compete at the highest level, it is hard for their small teams to grow.There is no incentive for them.

The difference between New England and the rest of the country is that a team in New England arguably needs more sailors than teams in the rest of the country, because of our focus on team racing. You are not obligated to team race in New England, but because there are so few fleet racing opportunities your season probably does not look too robust if you do not have a team race team.

That being said, I would like to point out that as a district, NESSA is not struggling for members. NESSA has a very strong membership which is largely due to the fact that we do so much team racing, and don’t have a lot of small, 1-5 person teams that are found in the rest of the districts.

When I grew up in a suburb twenty miles west of Chicago, I was able to have a team that consisted of four sailors: two skippers, one crew, and one girl who had never sailed before.  Both my junior and senior years, we went all the way to the ISSA Fleet Racing National Championship.  We never team raced.  In districts all over the country, plenty of teams like this focus exclusively on fleet racing.  In New England, however, you cannot do that.  The game we play is team racing, where you need six players all from one school to compete. 

I know that it is a challenge for startup teams to get a foothold in NESSA, but clearly a lot have been successful.  It takes time to build a team with depth, but that is where I see cooperation being the key. I personally believe that allowing cooperative teams to compete at the high level races in NESSA would be detrimental to the growth of the sport.  In my experience, once you start with a cooperative team, it is very difficult for those teams to “breakup” after they have been formed. It is not fair to the sailors to allow them to form a team, and then make them disband once they grow or become successful.   Instead of allowing cooperative teams, we need to come up with ways for teams to grow on their own. Defaulting to forming cooperative teams might actually slow the growth of High School Sailing by lessening the motivation to recruit more sailors and giving teams less of a reason to expand.

At the end of the NESSA Annual Meeting, we had to vote yes or no on the following proposal:

“a cooperation of teams, (unlimited), can combine efforts of sailors, (not all from the same school), with a limit of 20 sailors, for a time limit of 3 years, and compete at all levels of NESSA (including O’Day weekend, the Herreshoff Women’s Championship and the Mark Trophy)”

In other words, do we want cooperative teams in our district or not? The NESSA Membership voted down proposal 14-11.

After the meeting, it became clear to me that the community of sailors, coaches and parents that make up the NESSA membership need to help these smaller teams to get going. While including cooperative teams is one way to get more kids out on the water, maybe we need to find ways to make it easier for those small teams to exist and encourage them to grow independently in NESSA. How can we accomplish that?  Cooperation is key, not by adding kids from different schools to make teams, but by bridging the summer programs to the fall and spring programs.

On Martha’s Vineyard, the local community program, Sail Martha’s Vineyard, offers a fall program that includes 7^th and 8^th graders to get them up the curve and give them a basic understanding of team racing.  Providing younger sailors with sailing and learning opportunities also provides a feeder onto the high school team that Sail MV hosts in the spring. The Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School Head Coach Andrew Burr actively asks for names of 7^th, 8^th, and high school aged sailors from the various sailing programs on the Island who participate over the summer.  He then personally calls the families to see if the child is interested in the sport and gives them more information.  He also asks the current team members to ask their friends to consider j
oining the team, and after years of that system, MVRHS is now able to maintain a team of 18-25 members.  It is a lot of work to do that much recruiting, but it has certainly paid off. 

The following is a list of a few simple guidelines I would recommend to teams who are trying to grow.  We have had success with using these tactics at Sail Martha’s Vineyard with the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, and I hope they can help other teams too. 

   1) Before summer programs close for the season, reach out to local high school coaches; tell them about kids who sailed over the summer. During the summer, let young teens know about high school sailing opportunities. 

   2) Likewise, high school coaches need to encourage their sailors to continue to sail over the summer, at any level.

   3) Share boats, share coaches, share facilities, and make practice better for everyone.  Look no further than Chicago and Annapolis for proof that this works! The Chicago Yacht Club is home to well over 100 sailors, and multiple teams, that share boats and coaching.  Annapolis is another great example of this.  Most schools in NESSA have their own coach, and either own or exclusively borrow boats, which we know is expensive and a barrier for small teams.  There is nothing wrong with pooling resources for mutual benefit.

   4) Hold your sailors to a high level of commitment; kids need structure.  Sailing should not be any different than any other school practice.  If you commit to being on a team, then you need to be at practice, and at the events. 

   5) Finally, set achievable goals for your team.  Maybe that is to attend an out-of-state regatta or some other big event. Make it fun, and it will grow.

The proposal for cooperative teams came from the Narragansett Bay area, arguably the busiest summer sailing location in the country. Where are all of the kids who sail there over the summer going? They cannot all be going to private schools. But if they are, then we need to get more public school kids on the water learning to sail. Getting kids to join a high school sailing team starts well before they walk in the door as freshmen. Sailing during the school year helps keep kids engaged in the sport, which in turn helps the sport grow.

ISSA’s most recent report showed that membership has grown to 465 schools, and almost 5,000 student athletes.  That is 100 more schools than we had 5 years ago, and NESSA continues to be one of the largest districts.  We are certainly on the right track, but we need to all work together to keep up the trend.  Though great progress has been made in adding teams to ISSA and building participation in recent years, the work is not yet complete. We need to continue finding better ways to integrate newer, smaller teams and give them opportunities to compete and grow, especially in NESSA.

Please feel free to express your opinion in our feedback forum at the end of this article!

Excerpt from the ISSA Procedural Rules:

http://hssailing.org/documents/procedural_rules.pdf

1. ELIGIBILITY

1.1 SCHOOLS

All schools must be members in good standing of ISSA and their District Association, which must be recognized by the ISSA.

1.2 COMPETITORS

All competitors must be full time students, in the 9^th grade or higher, of the school they represent, and subject to the academic and disciplinary requirements of that school. A student is considered to be in his or her grade for the school year, including past graduation or advancement to the next level, until the new school year starts. Home schooled students may participate upon approval of their District Director by declaring the students association with a team within the student’s school district. Home schooled students shall, if possible, be associated with a team from the school in their district that they would normally attend. Teams (students) may not combine with teams (students) from another school to form a team.

Proposal given at the NESSA Annual Meeting:

Cooperative Teams Proposal

A Cooperative Team is consistent with NESSA dedication to fairness and competition by providing opportunities for many students to participate in sailing.

a. A Cooperative Team shall be defined as an interscholastic athletic team which includes students from two (2) but no more than three (3) schools to form a team. The NESSA Committee on Cooperative Teams has the authority to approve cooperative teams based on the information provided.

 

b. Purpose of the Cooperative Team is

 1. to allow student-athletes the opportunity to compete in all sanctioned NESSA sailing events.

2. to make a high school sailing opportunities available for student-athletes who may have limited school resources, sailors or access to the water

 

c. Schools may apply for the establishment of a Cooperative Team under the following guidelines:

1. The principals of the participating schools must approve the establishment of a cooperative team and apply to the NESSA Executive Director/ Board for permission to form a cooperative team.

2. The joint request must be in writing and made three (3) months prior to the start of the spring season in 2014 spring season.

Following the 2014 spring season and from then onward, the request must be made in writing by June 1st

The request/application must include:

i. a rationale for the formation of a Cooperative Team

ii. must have written confirmation from the School Committees (Governing Body) of all schools involved approving the request

iii. the following:

1. How the team will secure funding for the sport

2. List of coaches who are certified

3. Where the teams will practice (facilities)

4. Administration Authority of the program

5. Transportation arrangements to practices and contests

6. Written assurance that the Cooperative Team will not limit or lessen participation opportunities for students in any of the cooperating schools.

7. Designate the name under which the Cooperative Team will compete

8. Provisions for dissolution of the agreement by a school

iv. The application must be signed by the principals of the schools of the Cooperative Team

 

d. Other:

1. No more than three (3
) schools will be able to form a Cooperative Team

2. The combined 9-12 enrollment of all the schools involved will not exceed the 9-12 enrollment of the largest high school team in NESS.

3. All Schools of the Cooperative Agreement must be dues paying members of the NESSA and ISSA

4. No more than two (2) of the schools may have offered the sport the previous year.

5. The Cooperative Team shall be approved for no more than a three (3) year period.

6. Schools shall share equally in the NESSA sport participation fee(s).

7. Only one School Administration (Principal / Athletic Director) shall be designated as the contact person for the Cooperative Team.

8. If the application is approved, upon completion of the three-year period, the schools may reapply for the continuation of the cooperative team. There shall be no limit to the number of three-year periods for which schools can apply for approval of a cooperative team.

9. The NESSA Committee on Collaborative Teams shall render a written decision within six (6) weeks from the date that a complete application is received by NESSA in its office and for 2014 Spring, no later than Feb 1, 2014.