Featured Articles, The Weekly Routine
William McBride
New Years Resolutions For A Successful 2016
New Years Resolutions For A Successful 2016

Coach Quinn Wins Silver at Youth Worlds

In March of 2011, just as Dane was beginning to get serious about training as a skipper in the 29er, I received this e mail from papa Wilson:

Quinn really wants to sail on Sunday if that’s still a possibility… Whatever is best for Newt and Dane. Quinn’s time will come.

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Just over 3 years later, Quinn returned home from the ISAF Youth World Championships in Tavira, Portugal last month with his crew Riley Gibbs, bouquets in hand, and silver medals hanging around their necks.

With two prior ISAF Youth Worlds experiences full of emotional roller coasters, I’m sure that the silver medal this time has a tremendous amount of meaning to Quinn, and even to me it represents so much.  Over the last three and a half years, it represents thousands of hours of training on the water. It validates our training program, our theories on sail setup, and our methodical approach to strategy and tactics.  It represents a handful of draining, and highly emotional hours waiting nervously for protests to be decided.  It encompasses memories of being stuck in the freezing cold, memories of being surrounded by thunderstorms, and memories of scrambling to repair broken parts.  At this point, I have lived through moments of blood, sweat and tears (literally) with many of the people closely involved, and it is each of these moments which built character, revealed character, and ultimately made this medal so meaningful.

I’ll never forget sailing with Quinn for the first time on that Sunday in 2011 in a strange easterly breeze, tacking up the coast towards Summerland in a thick bank of fog.  After about an hour of beating upwind, Quinn had a big grin on his face, as he marveled at how fast we had gotten down the coast, and how he had never been so far from the harbor before.  As Dane and I prepare for our debut on the international 49er stage, Quinn will be pushing us hard from the coach boat to be the best we can be, just as he pushed Dane and Newt to prepare for their international 29er debut, and gold fleet finish in 2011.  In the next several months, Quinn will be launching his next big endeavor and while I won’t give it away, I think it’s safe to say that, I think that he will marvel once again at how far from home he has pushed his boat and his comfort level.

Congratulations to Quinn and Riley for their amazing performance!  We are very proud of you and we are so grateful to be a part of such an amazing team of people!

Learning From Coaches In The Month Of May

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With Dane and my first experience sailing with the other members of the US 49er squad right around the corner, we're getting excited to test out many of the skills that we've been working on for the last 6 months.  During that time, we've logged over 200 hours in the boat, completed more than 2000 tacks, and sailed in a wide range of wind strengths and sea states.  We have created our own style of boat handling and boat speed by maximizing flow over our foils and emphasizing a few other key underlying principles, and in May we'll finally get to see how our ideas stack up against the teams with more time in the 49er and more international experience in the class.  We are very confident that we are on the fast track to competitive boat speed and boat handling techniques, but going into the month of May, our goal is to ensure that we can adapt our techniques based on coaches feedback, while reconciling our own ideas about how we should be sailing the boat.  

Coach feedback can be one of the best ways to make huge jumps in skills and techniques, but in order to maximize returns on coaching time, it's important to understand how to utilize the feedback in the most effective ways possible.  The key to getting the most out of your coaches is to realize what set of tools that they can bring to the table, as well as the things that they can't.  Some coaches bring class specific experience, and can try to describe feel and nuances of various techniques, but for the most part, the biggest tool that coaches provide is visual comparison and feedback.  Through video and realtime feedback, coaches can help adjust your techniques to be closer to those of another team.  They can help you to discover new ways to approach challenges in boat handling, and they can help you to come up with creative solutions to work on your weaknesses.  Ultimately however, the most important part of the learning process is to relate the feel of the boat (which only you can experience), and your understanding of how the boat works, to the feedback that you receive from the coach.

Our speed and boat handling philosophies have several underlying cornerstone ideas including simplifying, stabilizing, and smoothing out everything that we do, so next month, we will absorb as much coach feedback as possible and we will ask ourselves, "How can we reconcile these ideas with our underlying principles?"  If the suggested changes bring us closer to achieving these principles, then we will change our techniques, otherwise we'll drill down into those core assumptions to try to analyze and refine our understanding of what makes boats go fast.  We're looking forward to an intense month on the water, and we're very excited to put this process to work with all of the coaches down in Long Beach!

Before the next time that you get on the water to work with a coach, take some time to think about (and write down!) what your underlying philosophies on boat handling and boat speed are, so that you can go in with a foundation to critically analyze feedback and build on your understanding.

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