Rod Davis
Mood shift
I missed a shift a couple of years ago, not a huge deal, but it took a while to realise it and get back in phase. It was not in my sailing (I miss those shifts all the time), but this one was in the coach- ing world. There were signs of a shift coming as some sections of sailing, particularly the Amer- ica’s Cup, went into freestyle with foiling boats,
computer systems to fly the boats and wing sails. The shift that got by me was a mindset shift for those who are
pushing the edge of development and sailing the boats. These sailors tend to be more freelance and less structured than past generations of sailors. More spontaneous and less methodical. A coach’s job is to get the best out of people. Come to think of
it, getting the best out of people is everyone’s job, or should be. Your workmates, your partner, kids, parents, everyone really. Your personal mission is to get the best out of each person. Do that, and everything else will fall into place. How do you do that? Now that is the tricky part because everyone
has different buttons to push. More importantly, everyone has but- tons you don’t push. Just keep your hands off them! Since Paul Elvstrøm was a boy the cardinal rule of coaching has
been repetition, process and repeatability. For 40 years the America’s Cup, Olympics and one-design racing
lived by the cardinal rules of coaching. That was until four or five years ago, or really since the America’s Cup in San Francisco in 2013. Foiling, and a learning curve that was driven by theory and computer simulation, not solely ‘on-the-water’ testing, have led to this new ‘shift’. The issue for all the coaches was ‘we are dealing in both worlds
simultaneously, trying to get the best out of our players (sailors) who come from both sides of the culture gap, but who are sailing on the same boat.’ The challenge in getting the best out of an individual is not the same for each person. And that is really annoying, because life
28 SEAHORSE
would be so much simpler if everyone was motivated the same way, or even in a similar way. Alas, coaching is not a set and forget world, never has been. We are always having to make adjustments to make it work. The fundamental trend is that the generation that has grown up
with iPhones, email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, instant access to information and virtual experiences see structure and routine as limiting their creativity and development. To me there has been a significant shift over the past 10 years
in how to get the best out of the new crop of sailors. Take something as simple as a race day programme. For 20
years Team New Zealand (and every other America’s Cup team) had a structured, even regimented, race day programme. Goes something like this: leave the dock at 10:30:00 hours (50 minutes before the warning signal), sail upwind and do five tacks for instru- ment calibration; tune with another boat for 15 minutes; practice set and gybes; 15 minutes to go last call on mainsail; 10 minutes last transfer of sails and six minutes, radios off, and so on. In the good old days a day’s sailing started with a plan the night
before! It was all written down, with a plan B and a plan C to fall back on in case the wind gods did not co-operate. Everything was pre-planned for the sake of efficiency. Nothing was left to chance. Michael Fay, merchant banker and funder of several Kiwi
America’s Cup Challenges, and Tom Schnackenberg (the biggest name in sail design at the time, and a famous free thinker) had an interesting discussion on pre-planning. Fay was giving his philosophy of running a business and going on about how everything has to be pre-planned. Quite passionately, I might add. A leads to B and that takes us to C. None of that ‘let’s see where this leads us and we will go from there’ stuff. Planning was the secret to getting the whole team pulling the same way. Tom, a mathematician but with more of an artist’s mind, just
could not convince Fay of the restriction of too much planning. Best example Schnack could give was, ‘I was walking down the road and
MAX RANCHI
GILLES MARTING-RAGET
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