By Joe Cooper
When I read that one of Newport’s local powerhouses in high school sailing, St.. Georges, had won the National Team Racing the Baker Trophy, it was an easy call to contact Roy Williams their head coach to check in.
S1D: Roy, congratulations on the win. Before we dig into that, give me a sketch of your background please.
RW: Thank you, the kids did a great job and the win was not clear until the finish of the last race. My background? Well I grew up sailing in Wales, in the UK sailing dinghies: International Cadet’s, 420’s, 505’s of all kinds small boats. This dinghy background is typical of most of the sailing clubs in the UK, very dinghy oriented and fewer ‘yachts’. I have been in the US for thirty years and have sailed on 110’s, 6 meters everything between and locally here in Newport. My educational background is as a civil engineer but somewhere in there I took a Post graduate Certificate of Education in the UK in Math teaching and outdoor education, and well here I am.
S1D: The Baker, held this year in Anacortes, Washington State had the extremes of weather, windy first day and then light and fluky for the second day. Did you have enough personnel to match weights for the different conditions?
RW: We had a full compliment of nine sailors. We used the same skippers and did use the heavier crews (some of whom were there as our alternate skippers) on the first day but I don’t think that in the FJ’s going too heavy is wise, they are lower freeboard and finer in the bows than the 420’s and if they are too heavy with crew, can get a lot of water in them especially in bad chop. I was really more focused on matching the skills of the crews.
S1D: Given that it was a National Championship, did you bring the big guns as it were?
RW: One of the skippers was Will Logue, current ISAF 420 US World Youth Champion but we also had one of the crews was a sophomore girl who has only been sailing since she came to St. Georges, so only two years of sailing, just at the end of her second year really.
S1D: You mentioned the regatta really went down to the last leg of the last race…?
RW: Yes, the sailing was 350 or so yards offshore and the angle for viewing was not ideal. In our race against Newport Harbor, they had a 1,2 at the bottom mark and so I did not know what was going to happen until the finish line. Our team managed to get back and win the race with a 2,3,5. In hindsight if they had won that race we would have been tied with them at 10-1 and they would have won the tiebreaker.
S1D: Do you have a formal structure for incoming freshman for joining the team?
RW: No, the only real criteria is if I think a new, non-sailor, is going to put him or herself or other team members at risk I might suggest they take a summer of formal sailing instruction first. We sail on Newport Harbor in the spring and the water is still cold. And for a non-sailor to get experience, it takes away from one of the skilled skippers who is in effect being a sailing instructor, at least for the first few hours so that needs to be weighed in the calculus.
S1D: Big picture philosophy, How do you conduct your sailing, what are you thinking of as you drive down to the boats?
RW: It depends on the part of the season, how far through it we are. In the beginning I concentrate on sailing fast and boat handling. Later on in the season, I concentrate on the finer details of execution. Especially in Team Racing, boat handling is so important so you really have to be good had handling the boat.
S1D: You mentioned earlier on a list of things that ‘win races’, what is that about?
RW: It an exercise we do almost every season. I get the sailors to write down a list of the factors that lead to winning races. This is all over the place as to who thinks what is important. So some of the newer sailors coming from say Opti’s, where there are big fleets, a good start can be almost the entire race. I write up on a white board all the suggestions. Then I draw a big circle that becomes a pie chart, and ask the sailors to allocate a percentage of each factor you can see what the elements are and how to rank them in importance. IT really gets the kids to think about what the different parts are in sailing and between fleet and team racing.
S1D: Are you seeing more girls entering sailing?
RW: I am seeing more girls coming as really good skippers. Sailing is one of the only sports I can think of where men and women compete as equals on the same field where there can be direct confrontation between them while competing. At the Women’s Championship (The Herreshoff Trophy) this year we had three qualifying regattas to get to 16 finalists. A few years ago we could only muster 10 schools with out qualifiers so in that sense yes, there are more girls in sailing, at least steering.
S1D: I noticed looking back through results that the same teams, especially from California are always in the hunt. Over a four-year cycle with high school and college sailing you can get fortunate and have good sailors all four years, but these schools have been in the top for 10 plus years. What is your take on this? More sailing time, sunny California?
RW: I don’t think it is more sailing time, we practice roughly the same amount of ‘formal’ total hours as the west coast teams, although they do sail far more fleet racing regattas than we do here on the East Coast. They do a lot more ‘messing about in boats’ sailing though. The really successful schools are in the sailing hub cities, Newport Beach and San Diego in particular. They are nearly all, if not all, Sabot sailors but early on they may spend time jumping in an out of other boats, such as FJs. This time in other boats, even though informal, certainly helps develop boat handling and boat speed. And again, early on, they do a lot of Sabot fleet racing, on courses that are a lot like the courses sailed at high school and college, so they are keyed up tactical situations. Good boat speed and boat handling, with solid tactics, makes for pretty skilled sailors.
S1D: Roy, thank you and again congratulations to you and the team
RW: My pleasure, thank you
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