Ken Legler’s TR Coach Notes #2 & 3

By Ken Legler

Practice Drills for Team Racing

Most team racing drills fall into two categories; race and re-set and forced rounding combinations.  There are plenty more but let’s start with these two.

In race and re-set simply start a team race until one team has a big lead.  The boat in first can sail all the way to last if that changes the score enough to make it a close race once again.  When someone asks who won, you can say they did, but we reset three times with our team leading big each time.

Forced roundings, just like rabbit starts, take a little bit of practice to set up efficiently.  You can line up between marks three and four or between marks one and two.  Round the marks in the desired order, such as 1-3-6 v. 2-4-5, without mark traps and go into your covering and passback schemes.

A really big team with 18 boats (six teams of three boats) could have drills starting at the leeward mark, at the windward mark and at the start.  After twenty minutes they can rotate to another part of the course.

The most classic team racing combinations are the 1-4-5 v. the 2-3-6.  You could practice this all season and never master it as it can be quite tricky with all six boats in on the action.  Let me know when you master play 2 from a 2-3-6 against a champion opponent.

Team Racing Communication

Maximize communication among teammates in between races but minimize talk during a race.  The problem with talking to teammates during a race is that up to all three opponents can hear you.  You could instead speak in code, or in a foreign language if you all know it.  Best example of how speaking backfires: During a B-level race between Tufts and URI at Roger Williams, Tufts held a 2-3-5 going up the last beat while URI was in a 1-4-6.  Both teams were hesitant to attack until…a Tufts skipper yelled out “Play two.”  The idea was that he wanted his teammates to pass back the opponent in 4^th to create a stable 2-3-4 combo known as play two.  The moment that hail was made, all three URI team knew two things; that they needed to execute their own play four (1-4-5 combo) and more important, they had to execute immediately, which they did, for the win.

Here is another losing example, 1996 college tr nationals approaching the finish against Old  Dominion and we are close to executing a 1-4-5 from a 1-4-6 just before the finish.  Our boat in 4^th reaches down to pin the opponent from tacking.  That’s when they hailed “Tack.”  Thinking the pin was solid the 6^th boat attempted to tack but tagged the opponent in 5^th right near the transom upon tacking out.  The subsequent penalty turn gave the win to ODU.  How did that happen?  The ODU heard the Tufts boat hail “Tack” and knowing the leeward boat would tack, they instantly slammed the brakes on by heeling with tiller pulled up to windward.

The short story is one should never tell their teammates what to do during a race since the other team will simply exeute the counter-move.  I know it is tempting to tell a less experienced team racer what to do but that is what practice is for.

If there are certain things you must communicate in a race then do so in code.  As a team invent a bunch of silly names for the following: play one, play two, play four, we need help, we’re at the layline, big puff or shift over here, I got my guy, etc.