A recent One design sailing survey says (no surprise here) sailing is overwhelmingly older and male.
Here’s how we change that (and we have some really good activities here in Lansing to share!)
Recognize that sailing, like a lot of sports, has a triangle problem. At the tippy-top are white men with a lot of time and money on their hands to devote to expensive boats, expensive crew and gear. At the bottom are everyday folks sailing at their local lake, having fun, but not being too serious. the gear is old, the sails are soft.
This pyramid appears in classes as humble as the Laser and Sunfish and as elite as high performance racing boats. It defines sailing magazines, championship series and the perspective (and reality) that it’s hard to ascend, so people stop trying. We need to flip that thing over.
Our attention, effort and focus in sailing should not be on the elite or getting to elite status. It should be putting all our effort and energy into the base. We start with the kids (a perfect mix of boys and girls) in summer camp, in youth sailing, the teens sailing with friends on the weekend, high school racing. The young professionals who love hanging at the club / lake / bay after work for some beercan racing and some beer cans after. The families who aren’t into racing but kinda like that boat that everyone sails at the club so they buy one.
The entire focus of the sailing industry should be into creating great everyday sailing events at your local club on your local boats and then sharing those stories and experiences far and wide.
Skiing kinda gets this. They realized that ski participation was aging and waning. And they have a lot more invested in massive operations with lifts, snow guns, mountains, hotels, facilities than sailing does. They offer free ski passes for 4th and 5th graders, they recognized that most of these kids grow up on their local hill, so they bought some of them (including my local hill, 45 minutes away from my house) and invested in them. Guess what happened? More skiers and more interest in skiing in the past decade!
Once upon a time ago, when I was living in Miami and wanted to get out of the hyper competitive Laser class, we showed up at a Lightning fleet and got rides as crew. Venerable fleet development guru (and at the time owner of Booby Trap), Fay Regan, said “if you belong to a club and they sail a $h1t Box 20, that’s the boat you buy!” I haven’t ever forgotten that (or Fay barking instructions at me as we rolled around in 18-22 and 4 foot seas in Biscayne Bay, as I fumbled the spinnaker pole.)
So, what if you do buy a $h1t Box 20 at your local club and they sail that nowhere else but your club, but you have a great time racing every week! Then, that’s the best kind of sailing there is. In the One Design survey, social connections was almost as high as improving at sailing or winning races. And if you survey my club, the social is even higher. I’ll bet its the same at yours, too.
But somewhere along the line, the focus on high performance sailing becomes “less fun” and where that happens, women, youth, and non-white sailors are left behind. Why?
Part is accessibility and part is inclusion. Most of us in sailing clubs get the second one way wrong and the first one sorta wrong. Accessibility is the means for someone to access sailing at their starting point. For almost everyone, the cost of a boat is high. So make sailing about sailing, not about boats. Our club has invested in fleets of boats that the club owns that anyone can sail (with the proper instruction.) More people sail club boats than fleet boats. We invited kayakers and built them racks, and they joined in droves, sending their kids to sailing camp and taking sailing lessons on the weekends (for free.) Our club boat associate memberships are $275 a summer for a whole family.
Accessibility meets sailors where they are – newly minted young professionals looking for an after work place to hang out and have a beer or glass of wine (we have to BYO at our club). Families looking for a place to hang out and swim, use the grill and the firepit, maybe do a little sailing. Everyone learns a little sailing, the racers show up on Wednesday nights and Sundays at our club.
Inclusion is a different story. Sailing is an overwhelmingly white, male sport. And as a (white) woman in the sport, it was a great way to meet men (I’ve been married 33 years, we met over the back of a Flying Junior – and sailing has been a part of our lives forever. Our kids “hate” sailing but love our sailing club, go figure.) For people of color, or women, sailing is a sport that is intimidating. Show up and it’s all old white men. Membership teams need to work hard on including everyone and work on friendship mentoring within clubs.
There are even factors (for women) that are difficult – such as getting banged up and bruised in the boat. We had one woman in our club leave the sport because her job required her to be in a skirt suit and she had to then explain her legs every Monday. I once had a woman behind me in a checkout line hand me a card for a battered woman’s shelter. Women don’t have access to bathroom facilities on board during long regatta days, and if you think this isn’t a problem, read this article from Sailing Scuttlebutt.
How do we craft small boat sailing events that work well for men, women, people of color? We make them low cost, accessible, we manage regattas not with massive offshore “sail for an hour to get to the race course” but nearshore, fun, round-the-bouys and back to shore events where everyone has a great time. We work to provide instruction with every race activity, building confidence among new sailors that they’re not going to get yelled at by the fleet champion because they don’t know the rules. And we invite them to invite their friends and hang out at the club when they’re not sailing, so sailing becomes a community and a place, not just an activity.
I tell my friends that my local sailing club is like my lake house (up north). Only it’s 7 minutes from my house, by car (15 by bicycle, on a paved pathway dedicated to bikes.) I can grill there, swim, sail, hang out. We have wifi, so I can even work there if I want to. I can go on a Tuesday with girlfriends and kayak, then sit and watch the sunset before heading home. It’s my third place in the summer.
Let’s build sailing’s appeal from the bottom – let’s focus our efforts in publications, in marketing, in video and media on the fun side of sailing and racing sailboats, not just the performance and competitive side of sailing. It’s OK to be mediocre at sailing, as long as you’re having fun. Every sailing class should feature photos, videos and images from the Wednesday night fleets that occupy 60% of their classes’ members and 90% of their time and attention. Our club maintains a photo album almost every week of this, but I’ll bet I’ve never seen any of those photos on a Laser class social feed.
Here’s my take:
Build club boat fleets
Reduce membership rates for club boat members
Reach out to new types of members (kayaks are a huge draw for us at our local club)
Offer free adult learn to sail classes (with a membership)
Host sailing camps for kids
Focus on easy, fast round the buoy racing with built in social events – pot lucks, a favorite local restaurant after racing, etc.)
Change the times you race to accommodate more sailors – we race Sunday evenings at 4pm in the summer on Lightnings so members can go to their cottages or camping up north or kid sports, and still get home for racing at the club.
Help members upgrade to your fleet boats by encouraging boat transfer within the club – an older member who doesn’t want to maintain a boat can “mentor” a younger one who can sail it more often
Get women in positions in the boat that don’t batter them up to let them experience sailing without pain. Foredeck is horrible. I wear protective padding sometimes which helps. My husband in the back hardly ever gets hurt (*hardly, I didn’t say never, dude, just not at the same rate.)
Take pictures and videos of all your sailing. The race committee is good for this. They’re only busy twice during a race. They have plenty of time when you come back through the line on the next leg. Everyone has a phone that takes pictures and videos.
For goodness sake, nearshore racing on short courses is way the hell more fun on a one design small boat than sailing an hour to get to a two mile long weather leg racecourse. For big boats, this isn’t a huge issue, but for anything with an open cockpit small boat, quit sailing miles to sail… more miles.
We really don’t care if the line is perfectly square. Stop spending so much time adjusting courses. The wind will shift anyway. The folks at Mark Set Bot can probably help you with the big regattas.
And yes, many of these new sailors will go onto sailing at higher levels. At those NACs, reward the people who finish in the back! Give a prize to the midfleet finisher. Make the events as much about social (not always beer…) activities. I hear the Thistle class has half-day racing at some of their events. What a brilliant idea! You can be a tourist at the regatta cities in the afternoons and your kids will want to join you!
What will your club or class do to build sailing?