In 2009 I ran the first ever "Skiff Squad Bootcamp" in Santa Barbara, California. It was attended by 29er sailors from around the country, and many of the alumni stayed connected to the program for years to follow, winning medals at the 29er Worlds and the Youth Worlds, attending prestigious universities as part of their sailing teams, and competing in the Olympics, SailGP, and the America's Cup. By all measures the program was a massive success. Two key ingredients to this success were:
A regional training model, focused on client feedback.
A financial model that offered elite coaching for a fraction of the cost of a private coach, while allowing coaches to make enough money to pay the bills.
At the Olympic level, such a model is difficult to build because the geographic scope is larger, the number of teams is much smaller, and the available resources are more contested.
In junior sailing, a coach who commits to building a regional program can impact many generations of athletes and provide the framework needed to win to a large number of teams across generations. This creates an ownership model in which coaches take ownership of the program, and shepherd athletes along the pathway to top level performance.
In contrast, at the Olympic level, each group of athletes requires a specialized program, so one size does not fit all. The strengths and weaknesses of the small number of top tier teams and athletes play an outsized role in determining what types of coaching and support are needed at each step of the way. As such, for an Olympic program to create generational success it must be laser focused on building a framework of support that caters individually to each team, and each athlete specifically. Nowhere in the world is this transition from Junior Sailing to Olympic Sailing more pronounced than in the United States, where we have some of the most robust junior sailing programs in the world, and one of the most challenging transitions when it comes to running a successful Olympic campaign. Success in this endeavor means fundamentally flipping the ownership model that athletes are used to as junior sailors and college sailors. I believe that we must help our athletes transition from a paradigm where “the program owns the athletes”, to the a model that can succeed in producing robust support systems for diverse teams at the top level, by creating a system where “the athletes own the program”.
The fundamental belief behind the US Skiff Squad project is that this means that coaches and administrators must build a system to develop leadership in athletes while simultaneously empowering the athletes to make existential decisions about the very programs, coaches and administrators who are enabling the empowerment. We envision a future where organizations from around the sailing world rally behind the athletes with a singular focus: supporting athletes to realize their potential.
This requires new levels of transparency and trust. The US Skiff Squad project is an attempt to build this system in the American ecosystem of sailing. It is a coaching structure focused first and foremost on leadership development in athletes, and empowerment of those athletes in the decision making process. The program does not seek to “own” athletes, rather it is the other way around. We believe that the athletes must own the team.
In my next few articles I’ll get into some specifics of what that looks like.