Putting Some Youth in Your Race Committee

An idea to create the next generation of Race Officers

Published: Wednesday, April 21, 2021
By: Jamie Jones, Program Director at Hoover Sailing Club and Area Race Officer for US Sailing, Area E

Anyone who runs races has seen it, especially when running races for younger sailors. There is always a sailor that crosses the finish line grumbling about how “the race committee messed me up.” 

We had that situation arise a few years ago and thought, “What better way to show young sailors we didn’t intentionally mess them up than to put them in charge of actually running races?” If we teach them, they will start to understand.

Fast forward a couple of years and we have a group of younger sailors running races and regattas in Columbus, Ohio. The Hoover Sailing Club Youth Race Team is one of the larger ones in the region with 40 kids on our summer race team and another 75 in our spring and fall high school sailing program. Between these two groups, we have a number of US Sailing-certified instructors who work for our summer sailing school when they are not racing themselves. When creating a youth-led race committee, this extra experience is an important detail, especially when we start talking about our teenagers running around in motorboats. All of these US Sailing-certified instructors have their NASBLA Safe Boater Certificates and hundreds of hours safely operating motorboats all summer long.

At Hoover Sailing Club, we look at providing the teens with the opportunity to run races themselves in a number of different ways:

1. Safety on the water is paramount. What better way to run a safety boat than with a Level 1/2/3 certified instructor who has been maneuvering their motorboats around Optis/420s all summer long?
2. Since most of our younger racers “expect” perfection when they are racing, they will do everything they can to set the fairest, most fun courses they can.
3. Many of our club’s adult members have little to no interaction with our youth programming. Having the youth sailors run races is a great way to show off what you have built and give a little back to the youngest segment of our membership.

So, how do you get this started at your club?

It all starts with the club holding a “Youth Race Management” course for the race committee team. We are fortunate to have connections to other Club and Regional Race Officers in our region who love to pay it forward and most other areas do too. Coordinating some interest from other officers helps to put the course together. 

Many clubs also have a beginning of the season “Race Committee Meeting.” Invite your youth race team (and their parents/coaches) to attend. Identify those kids who are interested (or you, as a coach, can volunteer them). Pair them with a mentor race officer and encourage them to help out with your club events/races. 

When days on the water come and I have an apprentice race officer with me on the signal boat, I will run the first race; they run the second with my help; then, they run the third and subsequent races with very little help from me. It is a great way for them to gain the confidence needed to make those tough race decisions. Sitting in the back of the signal boat and listening to them chat and make decisions is worth the price of admission!    

Taking the Next Step

Once they are ready for the next step, we start their actual regatta management experience with a small event. At Hoover Sailing Club, we started a “Friday Night Lights” series with our Opti team during the summer of 2020 since COVID arrived and there was no traveling allowed. Our junior Race Committee ran those races with no adult interaction. (We were on shore watching the racing!) 

Reach out to a fleet in your club and offer to help run fleet practice days. A couple of years ago, we paired our junior Race Committee with our local Interlake fleet to host a one-day Saturday event. All the juniors in the motorboats plus juniors on the signal boat plus adults in the sailboats equals tons of fun on the water.

Since it is pretty easy to get started, developing a youth race committee allows the kids to have a ton of fun while learning valuable skills and it frees up some of your normal race committee staff to get on the water and join their friends sailing! That’s a bonus, too. Teaching the next generation of race officials not only teaches appreciation for what the job entails but will go a long way towards serving our sport going forward!

If you would like to get your child involved in sailing, visit the US Sailing website and find the closest sailing center to you that offers learn-to-sail programming.

A version of this article appeared in the Spring Issue (Mar/Apr) 2021 of Great Lakes Scuttlebutt magazine.

tags: Kids & Pets, Racing, Sailing

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