When the score sheet lies...

Congratulations to the women's team this weekend for the incredible job they did under absolutely miserable conditions and unfortunate circumstances. I am very proud of them. It was pretty upsetting for me to be unable to find a coach since Schreyer, Uniack, Knowles, and Epstein were all unavailable. I didn't even have a vehicle to offer them. When we send bare bones teams to major intersectionals we are asking for trouble. When I say bare bones, naturally I'm referring to the fact that there was not only no coach, but no heavies, no extras, no help what so ever. And at a venue with open water and sailing in 420's at a major intersectional, filled with the top teams in the country, and against teams all more prepared than ours. That's not cool. It's not smart, and can be potentially devastating in the worst case scenario. Guess what, the conditions were the worst case scenario (sans rain or snow). Any worse, and they wouldn't have been sailing. That's just failing as a coach and coaching staff but unfortunately that's a situation that's probably going to happen again, until there are more full time coaches, more large vehicles to transport sailors, and plenty of participants available for the weekend. However, the women's team will not be without a coach again this season.
Of course, we go to more than two regattas a weekend and so lots of you have experienced the no coach, no heavies syndrome. But you are probably sailing against teams with no heavies and few coaches as well, so the playing field is a little more level and the stakes aren't as high since it's not an intersectional. In any case, we set up our women's sailors to fail this weekend. But they didn't. We hoped there would be favorable conditions. But there wasn't. The conditions on these open waters, on these particular days, were heavy wind and big waves (massive swells) and sailing 420's. Just to spice it up, we have a B division team that has little time in the boat together (not that A division has sailed together very long either and certainly not in these conditions). Situations like that call for coaches, but more importantly, they call for heavies! Instead, we sailed at the incredibly light weight of 220lbs in A Division, and we're vertical challenged as well. In B Division our height gave us a little more leverage and we had a little more weight but we were still sailing way, way, too light.
Just to make the situation a little more difficult, they sailed in these conditions all day long, not to 4pm or 5pm, no, all the way to sunset. Next up is a two and a half hour drive home, but there's killer traffic and it takes much, much longer. Oh well,
at least they can look forward to the drive back in the morning and the expectations of more nuking conditions and the promise of another day of more physical and mental
challenges. Wow, that's a lot for any one's plate.

So the hell with the score sheet. Sometimes the score sheet lies. What if we put the rest of the competition in the same situation; no coach, no heavies, sailing light, sailing with a new partner, how would they do? How would they hold up physically and mentally? We worked together well, coached each other, and had a great attitude. We tried to have fun in these awesome conditions. We could have been down and defeated but we took it all in stride and regarded the experience as the great learning tool that it was. In the big scheme of things, that's what's important.

I am very proud indeed.

-Coach