Blake Billman on Club Teams

Miami has managed to break into the top 20 with no paid coach, but they are lucky in the fact that they are located where there is a strong sailing community even within the University faculty and staff that is willing to help with logistics as well as a few volunteer ex college sailors that help with practices. This makes the team be able to compete dispite a meager school budget.

In terms of a "second tier" championship maybe college sailing should take a page from the high school sailors and their Great Oaks championship, which is based on the last time your team has made it to nationals. I think its somethings like if your team hasnt been to nationals in 4 years you are eleigble. Might not be a perfect system but it does not limit teams from competing for a collegiate nationals but gives more schools a chance at post season action... the NIT of high school sailing

It is nice to see this subject has generated such a response. The plan for Chris and I was to post this interview and then have me write a follow up article or two on the ideas and approaches that people seem interested in.

I think in the future I am going to change my terminology a bit from "club" and "varsity" to "coached" and "un-coached". I think it is deceptive for teams that may be classified by their schools as "club" or "non-varsity" to still call themselves clubs. If you have a paid professional administrator running your program, you are not a club team, its just what your school calls you and they have a litany of legal, financial, and regulatory reasons to keep you in that group (see Title 9 etc). Many coached programs also enjoy being in the club group because its keeps them out of the same legal/financial/regulatory morass. There is even a third option (which no one has mentioned), where the teams coach actually works for the yacht club that hosts them not their university, keeping them in the club group for their school.

When I talk about the issues facing club teams I am not just talking about those on the bubble of being competitive nationally. That is the direction the interview and this discussion headed in, but I am just as concerned about all the small sailing programs around the country. In SEISA we have several teams that operate on less than $2000 a year and one program that only gets $400 annually. It's hard for them to make it to more than a few regattas a semester and pay SEISA dues, much less fix a boat or get a new one. They are operating at the very margins of sustainability and they need the most help in my eyes.

My version of "help" is not grants or aid or any kind of special treatment, but giving them access to some of the knowledge that older and more experienced teams have accumulated so they can use it to grow and prosper. I have found in SEISA that when a small program has an issue, its great if you can give them a list of how other schools have handled similar situations and then let them choose what will work best for them.

I still do not believe that the only way for a non-coached (club) team to break into the top 20 nationally is to totally throw out who they are and get a professional administrator. I am still convinced that there must be a middle that we have not yet discovered and it is one of my goals to determine what that system would look like. By telling small programs "getting a coach is the only way to the top" you define the box and then they have to force themselves to fit into it. Better they see the goal (top 20 nationally) and consider every option of how to achieve that.

I don't think a second tier national tournament or a club championship is a good idea, but I am open to the discussion. Right now in college sailing we are already going through massive changes in our championship system. Currently on the docket we already have: the new semifinal systems for co-ed and women's, possible changes to the berth allocation formula for TR, the change from sloops to match racing, and people asking for a fleet and TR semester schedule. I suppose one more wouldn't change things, but with that much else going on a decision of that magnitude wont get the attention it deserves. I also think that a lot of bubble teams wouldn't be willing to conceded that they cant compete with the varsity programs or at least give up the chance to try in exchange for some "other" championship.

Thanks and please keep the discussion going, this is all great stuff.
B

I agree with much of what Blake is saying, and I think he has the right ideas in mind with what to do and how to do it. In particular training athletic crews from scratch and not exactly being able to do that with a skipper, and needing to recruit those skippers. But in order to do that you can't have a student run program from a club perspective. You need to have some sort of coach whether it be a part-time coach who has another full time position or whatever but you need someone to speak with the incoming sailors that are sailors on the team. What gain does a starting skipper on a club team have for recruiting someone better than he/she is to their respective team. I think that the important thing is to definitely raise money to travel and to go to good events, but even more importantly it is much more important to have good practices. We have seen teams at the varsity level that have had the "1 year ban" from competition and still done very well. It's because they have coaching leadership ON and OFF the water to get those practices to a great level of competition. At the top 10 schools in the country, many of the practices are better than a B level intersectional. The key to bringing a small club school to a competitive level is bringing in a coach who can facilitate the growth of the team allowing the sailors to simply focus on sailing. Letting SEISA kids (even from their freshman year) just go to Trux or Danmark for 3 years is not going to get them to the level they need to be at unless they get the practice each day. Practice first before going to the events. 100 days of good practice sure as hell beats 9 intersectionals over a 3 year period. Good practices come from good sailors, and a good facilitator. The facilitator of the practice is a coach. Sometimes a good "coach" is merely someone who can set up a plan of attack and set up the drills to run smoothly over approximately a 3 hour session. My recommendation to the club teams is yes to raise money and support from your school, but not in the effort to simply "go to intersectionals", sell it in the effort to recruit not yet the top sailors in the country, but the top coaches in the country. And many of the assistant coaches in the districts of MAISA, NEISA, and SAISA are where you want to look. Someone who has seen what it takes to grow and someone who knows what these schools have done at the elite level of competition. Get the coaches young while you can with a basic 5 year plan to build a program, not just a quick trip to Semi-Finals to finish 15th. Programs take time and patience but it starts with leadership at a coaching level. Long story short here, SEISA should be looking to raise money and talk to their schools about hiring full-time coaches with benefits and an affordable salary. We have all seen what a club can become with the addition to a coach. For example Yale was a club team until they got a coach, Hobart was a club team until they got a coach, UVM, Georgetown etc. you catch my drift. All of these schools have been at the elite level in this decade at one point in time. They didn't do it over night. Get Coaches... Actual coaches, not a math professor. Spending $40 - $60 thousand on a coach rather than going to intersectionals un-coached would certainly pay more dividends. Basically it would be better to have a full-time coach for three years of development with Freshman sailors, then to go to intersectionals for 3 years.

uvm has a paid coach= not a true club team and definetly not what he is talking about in this interview

What do you mean by "club teams?"

or maybe a club team only regatta?

it pretty much comes down to money. it's just not feasible for us to travel out east to the competition more than a couple times a semester, and that's just not good enough. plus, 18 hour drives on both sides of the regatta mean a lot of missing classes.