Helping the next generation of sailors to find sailing
Issue 128: Sept/Oct 2019
In 2016, my family and I were lucky to witness the dawn of the resurgence of youth sailing in American Samoa. I wish everyone could experience the joy of pushing hard on the transom of an Opti to launch a smiling child into a bay breeze for their first solo sail. Of course, many have experienced that joy, all over the world. And that’s a good thing, right?
A while back, Geoffrey Emanuel, for four years a junior sailing instructor, wrote on SailingScuttlebutt.com, “I am thoroughly convinced that what [junior sailing instruction] needs is a grenade rolled into the room I see full of status-quo thinking.” Emanuel was writing emphatically about the problem he sees, of the status quo burning out junior sailors with a “forced march to race and win” pressure-cooker approach to sailing.
Commenters on Emanuel’s post and similar posts say they see kids leaving sailing after high school and wonder whether it’s an emphasis on competition that’s driving many kids away. Opti-parents come under the gun frequently, accused of turning what was designed as a fun little dinghy for kids to play with, into a Grand Prix-class in miniature, with no apparent restrictions on cost. Parents spend fortunes carting boats and kids all over the country and to international competitions, they hire coaches, and they buy chase boats . . . pressure, pressure, pressure.
And if some kids are getting burned out on sailing or, worse, turned off by sailing, because of how we’re exposing them to the activity, we’re not going to wind up with a next generation of adults who sail for pleasure and recreation. That’s the fear — and perhaps, the cause of the decline in interest in sailing we see today. And if there are fewer parents who sail with their kids simply for the joy of sailing, than there were in the 1970s and 1980s, and if the only other opportunity youth have to be introduced to sailing is race-oriented, then maybe Emanuel is right, we need to change the status quo.
US Sailing Vice President (and former Training Committee Chair) Rich Jepsen suggested that current junior sailing instruction isn’t aligned with sailing’s interests. “If our goal is to create more lifelong sailors, then we need to serve each segment of interest, rather than fit all kids into a single experience.”
I agree. But the only means I see of accomplishing that is for all of us who sail for pleasure to seek out non-sailors with whom we can share our joy of sailing. It’s up to individuals, it’s up to us. It’s up to each one of us to share sailing as a fun escape from the daily grind. It’s up to us to show that sailing isn’t so complicated, that it can be safely enjoyed long before it is ever mastered. It’s up to us to counter the perceptions that sailing is an elite pastime with high-dollar barriers to entry. It’s up to us to get people out on the water under sail, showing them that it doesn’t have to be about aiming for a specific buoy, but can be about wandering with the wind.
In the years since I pushed those smiling kids into the gentle trades that blow off Coconut Point, sailing coach Matt Erickson and other members of the Sailing Association of American Samoa, Inc. (SAASI) have launched many dozens of new sailors into the waters around Pago Pago. Kids they’ve taught from the beginning have graduated to Lasers, competed locally, trained for the Pacific Games, and have their sights set on the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Shockingly, there was no youth sailing program of any kind for these island kids when Matt and his wife, Brittany, began in 2016.
Despite SAASI’s lofty and potentially alienating competitive goals for the American Samoan kids, I know that not one of these young sailors’ love of the pastime is being squashed by competitive urges they don’t share. I know this because I know Matt. I know his enthusiasm for life and sailing eclipses any competitive goals of the organization. I know that non-competitive kids are not being pushed or excluded and that it will be impossible for any of them not to be infected by the pure joy of sailing Matt exudes.
And maybe that’s the other angle, that those involved in running and coaching competition-oriented junior sailing programs continue grooming the racers-at-heart, while also ensuring space for the junior soul sailors. We need them all.
