In 2017, my first day of coaching in Miami ended unexpectedly with a broken steering cable on a coach boat in the middle of the Gulf Stream. Old, poorly maintained equipment is a variable that erodes athlete confidence in their coaches, and as such, our program needs the best tools for the job. The coach boat that we buy using these funds will go into a fleet of professionally maintained boats, which will be rotated out of the fleet after four years of work, to ensure that the quality of the fleet stays high, and that we mitigate unexpected costs, by rotating the fleet before major issues arise.
One of the biggest low hanging fruits to save money for teams is by owning the coach boats that our coaches need . Daily coach boat charter fees range from around $150-$250/day depending on the location, and if you figure that an Olympic team will do around 180-200 days of sailing per year, that works out to what would be a minimum of $30,000 per year if we had to charter every day. There are a lot of coach boat options, but in terms of quality of construction, longevity of the boat, and minimizing impacts on coaches bodies, the VSR is the standard right now. It makes a huge difference to have a reliable, dry stable boat to eliminate distractions and allow coaches to focus on the things that really matter.