Just Like That ~ 7 years

We are about to embark on our seventh season. For longstanding institutions, 7 years might be infancy but we aren’t a burgee branded club, so for us this marks a significant milestone.

2NINER was founded in 2016 to offer consistent high performance programming in South Florida. A handful of passionate families blazed a new trail in youth sailing to bring faster, colorful craft to the water. In that short time, our athletes have secured 5 medals at the Youth Worlds and 5 top 25 finishes at the 29er World Championships. Our alumni attend Ivy League schools, have won College Nationals, pursue Olympic sailing, compete on the pro-circuit. But that’s not how we measure our success.

I always evaluate the success of our organization by asking one question: Are we ‘doing right’ by this athlete?

In an act of deep reflection, I’ve compiled a list of ten not so obvious takeaways about winning, losing and all the days in between.

Please take these and use them to avoid the painstaking slow pace of growth that we’ve heartily trudged through.

1. People Want To Help

It’s more art than science to unify a group of competitive teenagers. More so, each athlete comes with a parent, or two. Add in the coach’s agenda and now we’ve got a melting pot of opinion and experience. The reality is that we are all stakeholders collaborating to support each child’s development. Team culture and alignment play a big role. It also takes close attention to understand that individuals need different things, and there is not just one path to success. Those who have embraced our organization's mission year in and out become the most influential ingredient to our success. ‘Who' is more important than 'what' or 'how.'

As a young coach I was terrified to accept the help of others because I thought it was the quickest way to expose my lack of skill. To ask for help is to show weakness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Inviting collaboration from shareholders is to leverage the most powerful aspect of an organization.

2. Teamwork Is The Answer

And in a two person high performance boat the harmony of both helm and crew must be in perfect unison. Let me put it plainly, without perfect alignment of the mind, body, and spirit of two individuals the boat simply won’t perform as designed. It demands constant focus to bring two orbits into alignment, especially when trying to sail fast in challenging conditions.

Zoom out to the larger team and the principle remains. Teamwork is putting the needs of the group and mission ahead of one’s own personal ambition. And the most powerful arrangement is when each team member works in support of their mate.

3. Hardwork Pays Off

I wrote an article in 2019 where I outlined three ways to win in youth sailing: out smart, out spend, and out work. My thesis was that you could only win with two out of the three factors and it didn’t matter which. Experience has taught me that one of those three factors must be out work. To have the confidence and skill of execution in a world class environment requires experience of pressure testing and rigor. And there’s a certain mindset of knowing you worked harder than anyone else. There’s an attitude of entitlement that is necessary to win at the top level. And typically, the suffering endured tempers the ego. Competitive entitlement is like salt. A little goes a long way. And too much will spoil the meal.

4. Confidence Has a Bad Side

Confidence is the result of competence. Competence, knowledge, experience are earned. The thing about confidence is that it can be intoxicating. And like too much wine, leads to dullness and lethargy. The reality is that sport is always changing, so to must we evolve. Every wave, puff, race, regatta is different from the last. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security and keep your confidence in check.

5. Losing Is The Best Teacher

Never have I been more motivated to work harder, think more creatively, experiment and test new ideas than after I’ve completely flopped. But it took me years to confront my fragile ego and embrace my own weaknesses. Let’s face it, it feels a lot better to give yourself a pep talk and move on than to dig into the devilish details of misfortune or failure. And it’s a lot easier to point to circumstance, conspiracy, or plain bad luck than to take ownership of your own actions. But learning is a process that always has an element of failure. Anna Tunnicliffe once told me that she hates to lose more than she likes to win. There’s some evolutionary science behind the human brain’s ability to retain negative memories over positive memories. And those who are willing to stand up and face the music have the most to gain.

6. Isolation Slows Progression

There are moments where private coaching is needed. For example, when digging into details of boathandling, or movement specific processes then it’s nice to have a set of eyes focused on one piece of the puzzle. But beyond that, my commitment to team oriented programming remains.

Environment is everything for us social animals and often the power of peer pressure is more influential than one’s own desire to succeed or fail. So with regards to motivation and effort the team is what produces quality training.

Varied perspective is also paramount. We quickly get so sucked into our own fishbowl brains that it’s important to pull your head out of the sand and listen to someone else’s perspective and experience. My favorite debriefs occur when athletes starts talking to each other and try to explain things to their teammates.

There’s a quote used to endorse reading books that’s often found in libraries and book stores: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

Sailing on your own is a lot like be illiterate in this way. The team environment offers the teammate the opportunity to learn from someone else’s mistakes without having to make them on their own.

7. Winning Isn’t Happiness

Maybe happiness is the wrong word. Content perhaps is a better substitute. I've noticed that those who pursue the podium in our sport are rarely satisfied. In fact, I think you have to be a bit restless to be a winner. There must exist an inherent desire to criticize one’s own actions in order to learn.

In order to push against the rising tide of competition, one must crave the opportunity to debrief the mistakes race to race, rather than quickly move forward to preserve the ego. To succeed at the highest levels of competition requires a compulsion to fulfill the details that matter, a hunger for success, and a revulsion against the status of mediocrity. Who will submit his own ego in pursuit of greater achievement ? Fortune favors the bold.

8. People Grow, So Let Them

I have a papaya in my yard that I planted a few months ago. After growing up one foot once in the ground, the stalk took a sharp left turn and now sticks out the side. It might not be getting taller, but it is still growing.

It’s very rewarding to work with youth in their teenage years because they are always changing. Overnight someone’s height, weight, maturity, attention span, physical capability can shift. As a coach, it’s hard to remember this. We work with athletes in high pressure environments, the stress of competition and performance anxiety often push sailors to fall back on bad habits.

Performance in sport is not linear and often has a lag between comprehension and execution. It takes the brain on thing to sort out and solve problems it’s never been faced with- TIME. I’ve been chewing on a theory that execution in sport is on a three month time delay. Meaning that the things our athletes were working on last summer and early into the fall is now finally starting to be realized.

Does this mean we are bad at teaching? No, surely we can always improve, but the ebb and flow of human performance is as constant as the tide’s change. The art of coaching is to appeal to the athlete’s best self and as that person evolves the coaching must meet them where they’re at.

9. Communication Solves It

In the business of sport almost everyone has three things: an ego, agenda, and the desire to win. The only way to move in the same direction as an organization is to talk about it.

When new pairs start out with each other, they talk about as much as veteran pairs do. That is to say, not very much.

Veterans say less is because non-verbal communication is the primary method. New teams silence themselves in order to focus, the novice simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to talk because they are so overwhelmed and focused on doing their specific job to think about anything else. This is not non-verbal communication, it’s more like two strangers stuck on a runaway train.

Both examples are here to make the same point. When a problem exists, communication fast tracks finding the solution. And the more and more I push into understanding how to optimize human interaction, I always circle back to this bullet point. Communicating is both listening and speaking, and the wise will tell you to do those in order.

10. The Game Always Changes

In 2016, we were the only high performance team consistently training in the US. Today there are programs focused on foiling boards, cat sailors at yacht clubs, and many turning toward winging and waszping. While the majority of the American sailing’s population sticks to their water huggers, high performance sailing is catching on.

On the performance side of things, one takeaway from the 29er Worlds in Spain this summer - which was held in light “water hugging” non-planing conditions - is that Europe and the rest of the world are fast tracking their youth and coaching staff into the 29er. This brings a revised style of play that pays homage to dinghy experience the lionshare of participants enter the 29er class with. Gone are the just send it days of yore. As the fleet grows, it brings race preferences for more tactical, higher angled racing. Every regatta is different but the fleet tendency these days is a bit more moderate than extreme. A noticeable shift from the pre-covid era.

There are self-evident truths to racing and principles that will withstand the test of time. But as for the nitty, gritty details of how to win sailboat races on any given Sunday, like every wave or shift, the competition is different everyday and will continue to change with time. The key is to pay attention with eyes and ears wide open to notice the subtle changes of the fleet and it’s players.

More and more the protest room is becoming an important place to pick off boats in a regatta week. And those who know me best, know that I abhor the room- I think if it’s not settled on the water then it doesn’t deserve a second look. I have grown myself in this arena, and now see the room as just another aspect of the game. As Dave Perry says, “the rules are the seeds of tactics.” And we are all obliged to follow the rules. Non-American sailors, I have observed, use the room in major championships the same way you might take someone’s pawn in a game of chess. That is to say, without a second though- it’s all part of the game.

Thanks for reading!