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College and Olympic Sailing Response, by John Vandemoer, head varsity sailing coach at Stanford University

This is the fourth in an AirWaves Series on Youth-to-College-to-Olympic sailing. Enjoy!

Brought to you by Mauri Pro Sailing

College sailing is absolutely a path to Olympic sailing, is it right for everyone? Probably not, but that is what’s great about being human; what is right for one is not necessarily right for another.  In Joe and Stu’s article, and in most of the responses the points were based on actually sailing, but I think college sailing and college itself benefits Olympic campaigners immensely in different ways.

My experience with Olympic level sailing is different than some, I live vicariously through my wife, Molly O’Bryan Vandemoer, who as well as being a college All-American and National Champion, has also campaigned 470’s and who is now fully focused on women’s match racing as a member of Team Tunnicliffe.  Listening to her recap her challenges and successes during training sessions and World Cup events I can’t help but think of the lessons learned in college sailing.  College sailing is much more then boat handling, short course tactics, and starts, it is about working within a team, managing your life, and dealing with relationships with teammates, coaches, umpires, race committee, etc.  College sailing is a crash course for life lessons.

A successful college team is one that works together to become better; the players all focus on improvement and hard work to build each individual’s ability into team strength.  The current system for USSTAG seems to be built around the basic college sports model: work together, share, and make each other stronger.  These are all lessons of a strong college team.

The next life lesson that college sailing imparts is dealing with your emotional IQ, a successful sailor is one that can control their temperament and stay focused on racing well.  Sailing is a tough sport, maybe even the toughest with all the variables that contribute to it. Being able to manage your emotions and deal with your competitors, coaches, race officials and judges is a mandatory skill for success.  Everyone has had a race, at any level that was affected by a variable outside of your control; it is how you handle these variables that makes you a champion.  College sailing pushes these challenges at you every weekend with tough venues, changing conditions, no drop race, umpires and judges with all sorts of experience, and the slew of colorful coaches on the sidelines.  Then it throws at you wind delays, protest delays, homework, midterms, and the ever-evolving romantic relationships all in 48 hours.  A great college sailor can manage all of these distractions and see the racecourse in front of them.  Four years of sailing in college helps you develop a high emotional IQ, it helps you to learn to respect the relationships you have with sailors, coaches and race officials and it keeps you focused on sailing your boat and the race course well.

I see my wife use these lessons everyday in setting up training sessions, working with her team, and dealing with the challenges of her discipline.  Will college sailing make you a top-level technical Olympic sailor? No, but it will help you recognize the tools you need to get there which can sometimes be the hardest part.  Learning how to learn, how to use coaches, and how to use the resources around you are all the strengths of college and of college sailing.

I like the idea of a college sailor getting international experience and Olympic sailing experience when they can during their four years of college.  These experiences make you a better sailor, teammate and person.  However, the focus of college should be college, it should be learning in the classroom and learning from those tough choices that come up in a college life.  I really feel these are invaluable and will help anyone succeed on the Olympic circuit.  I do not think it matters if you win the gold at age 26 or at age 18.

This is the third in an AirWaves Series on Youth-to-College-to-Olympic sailing. Enjoy!

After posting a quick comment to Joe Morris’ piece in Sail1Design I was invited to read Kenny Legler’s “part two” piece on the subject and then expand on my first posting into something a bit more formal.   Well, here goes.

Firstly I find the subject (is college sailing the “right path” for top youth sailors?) very interesting and my initial reaction was – “of course”.    I figured –  when you’ve got it “flaunt it’. And in the US we have an amazing intercollegiate sailboat racing scene that has only gotten better since I was sailing 420’s at YCYC.

But maybe my initial reaction was a bit too much of just that,  a reaction – without fully thinking about the question.  After reading Joe/Stu and Kenny’s thoughts I still am thinking about the question and now have more questions.

Kenny took a bit of a look back at the history of American college sailors in the Olympics. This was informative – and he helped coin a useful phase – “the professional era” of Olympic Sailing (post ’92).  But I still want to know: What are the backgrounds of the international medalists in this era?  Like all of us following recent Olympiads, I know that many medalists enjoy extremely deep funding from their respective national team.  But what step did they take after youth sailing?  Most countries don’t have a collegiate sailing circuit so the fact that these guys and girls didn’t “sail in college” doesn’t necessarily mean that they wouldn’t have benefited from it – if such a program was available.

Or maybe we need to examine the age of the recent international medalists… could it be that like in many other pro sports, the average age of the top athletes has lowered since the “amateur era”?   Are more Olympians enjoying success in their “first try”?  If so, that would lend credence to the argument that even in the US – the Olympic path diverges at an earlier age – so that college sailing is an unnecessary diversion rather than a step along the road to sailboat racing nirvana.

Is Olympic sailing at a point where, like for the young high school basketball phenom, the path to the “big leagues” is to forgo collegiate athletics in favor of turning “pro” at age 18?   But even in pro basketball,  not every high school superstar succeeds at the professional level,  much less gets the 30 million dollar contract that provides a financial raison d’être for forgoing a college degree.  So I’m right back to where I was in my initial reaction to the question – it would be a pretty risky move to advise an aspiring elite youth sailor to miss out on college sailing – much less a college education.

In the US, I’d rather keep fueling the collegiate sailing ranks with our top youth and turn my questions to smart people like coach Ken and ask – how do we help collegiate sailors develop better boat speed – boat tuning skills (to supplement their tactical/boathandling education) during their college years? Is there a way to have your cake and eat it too?

Maybe we just have to poke around at this question a bit more before it reveals its secrets.

Once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right!

This is the second in an AirWaves Series on Youth-to-College-to-Olympic sailing. Enjoy!

Olympic Sailing or College Sailing

(If you have not read the Airwaves piece below this post, you may want to read that one first. This piece by Tufts coach Ken Legler was written in response to Joe Morris’s opening essay on this topic.)

Joe Morris was right.  It is nearly impossible to sail in college and compete for an Olympic medal in the same year, or quadrennium for that matter.  You can complete college and then do the Olympic campaign but as Joe points out, you need to start your campaign earlier in order to compete with the increased level of professional talent from other nations.  Here is a look at the past and potential solution to the problem:

Former college sailors have done incredibly well representing the USA in Olympic Sailing but very rarely while they were in college.  If we divide the history of Olympic Sailing into three eras we have 1 – Pre-war (WWII) with elite yachtsman sailing a few keelboats, 2 – Post-war (1948-1992) with amateurs competing in various dinghy and keelboat classes, and 3 – Modern day (1996-present) with professional sailors.  Though the US won its share of the precious metal pre-war, we flourished in the amateur era.  Our two peaks was 1984 when we medaled in all seven classes (while the Eastern Bloc boycotted our home regatta in Long Beach) and 1992 when we medaled in nine of ten classes in Barcelona.  Savannah’96 was a rude awakening with only two bronze for the home team.  Pros from other lands took advantage of some US misfortune on what was supposed to be our home waters but, was it really home?  Our sailors had no more experience in the waters of Savannah than the well funded teams from abroad.  Nor could we out-tack, out-jibe, and most important, out-speed the seasoned pros.  We too needed to go pro to compete.

1984 470 Worlds Jib Mark photo by Ken Legler

Our former college sailors have dominated the ISAF Team Racing Worlds but it’s not the same sport.  All-American amateurs with full-time jobs willing to train hard can and do win the TR worlds.  But what does it take to win an Olympic medal these days and in future Games?  What role does college sailing play in helping or hindering our Olympic sailing athletes?  Here are some past examples of college dinghy sailors going for gold.  I’ll leave keelboats aside as sailors in these classes need not be young and super agile, rather they need be big and cunning.  In 1976 Peter Commette did his best international sailing before graduating from Tufts.  He won the first Laser Worlds in 1975 and raced the Finn in the ’76 Games before graduating in 1977.  He was also an excellent college sailor but not an All-American.  He was certainly good enough but lacked the necessary quantity in college regattas while training for the Olympics.  Our 470 reps were the even younger Whitehurst bros not sailing in college at all.  Along came Olympic sailing for women in the mid-1980’s.  Initially 22 teams put a toe in the water at the women’s 470 midwinters.  That got whittled down to 14 teams by the trials.  13 had skippers that had been great college sailors, many recent.  One did not.  Trials winner and Olympic champion Allison Jolly did almost no college sailing for her club level team.  To be fair, her crew, Lynne Jewell was an excellent college sailor a few years earlier at BU.  In 1996 two recent college-sailors-of-the-year, Tyler Moore (Charleston’94) and Ryan Cox (Navy’95) teamed up in the 470.  I asked Josh Adams who was also campaigning a 470 how they looked.  They certainly had the current college sailors rooting for them, thinking they must be favorites with those credentials.  Josh responded, “Well, they certainly race well…but they have no chance against Morgan (Reeser, 1992 silver).”  It was clear racing well isn’t enough.  Skip ahead to 2008 where we medaled in two dinghy classes with Zach Railey, not sailing in college, capturing the silver in Finns, and Anna Tunnicliffe, ODU’01 as Olympic champion in Radials.  Anna had many things going for her in combination including athleticism, drive, support from others, and a solid background of racing well from her college days.  It should be noted that the only college dinghy classes also sailed in the Olympics are the Laser and Radial.

Joe mentioned Stu McNay, who answered interview q’s for sail1design.  Academics aside, it seems Stu’s athletic major at Yale was college sailing with a minor in Olympic sailing.  After three more years of Olympic training post-college, Stu made it to the Games and did well with two bullets but no medal.  Given the climate of modern Olympic sailing, competing against full-time, well-funded professional athletes, what will it take to overtake Britain and other nations as the best in the future?  I’m not asking about Stu, who is looking good at the moment ranked second in the World at this juncture, I’m wondering about our more distant future.

College racing has also gotten harder.  To make the All-America team these days, a skipper needs to specialize in homogenous college dinghies, and college team racing.  Could someone minor in college sailing while majoring in international sailing the way Peter Commette did in the 70’s.  The coach wouldn’t like it if his or her star recruit didn’t practice and compete with the team very often.  Perhaps we coaches could embrace the idea of having a few of our sailors train for the Olympics while studying as it were a different varsity sport.  This will be a tough sell since the model of varsity athletics is to strive to beat the other college teams for ol’ U.  Is not pride of excellence enough when compared to garnering college championships and racking up All-Americans?  Certainly Yale, Old Dominion, and many other programs take pride in their many Olympians, just as U. Rhode Island takes pride in their international big-boat victories.  But still, these international achievements do not help in the rankings, All-America count, or college championships.

Let’s suppose some schools did offer varsity Olympic sailing as a piggy-back to college sailing.  What would it look like?  How would the two overlap, if at all?  Veteran college sailors should at least be able to out-roll tack anybody, or can they?  The moment you change to an international class, rule 42 (kinetics, including limits on tacking) changes.  The first venue that comes to mind is Yale on the widest part of Long Island Sound.  Kings Point, Navy, and Old Dominion also have open water.  The Boston schools are seemingly sailing on creeks and puddles but nearby and accessible Boston Harbor is a fine open-water venue where a combined university program could be launched.  St. Mary’s need only venture to the mouth of the Potomac for their open water and other programs can also find it not too far away.

I wish such a program existed at my high school alma mater, Tabor Academy.  Prep schools l
ike Tabor have a model where all students take a sport all three seasons but always a different sport to help them become well-rounded.  If they did though, I can imagine a fantastic sailing experience in the fall.  Let’s say they had six Lasers (with Radial rigs too), four 470s, and two matched keelboats.  On windy days they could train on Buzzards Bay and on light days they could stay ashore for boat work and physical conditioning.  They would not be racing against other schools but inviting sailors from other schools as guest training partners.  In the spring they could go back to the 420 team racing which they do so well.

Note: Early on as Tufts coach, Ken was a part-time US Sailing coach for 470s and other classes, 1981-85.