{"id":4085,"date":"2012-08-12T09:19:29","date_gmt":"2012-08-12T14:19:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/?p=4085"},"modified":"2012-08-12T09:19:29","modified_gmt":"2012-08-12T14:19:29","slug":"thought-sailing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/?p=4085","title":{"rendered":"ANOTHER THOUGHT ABOUT US SAILING"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am one of the coaches for the NZ men&#8217;s 49er and the women&#8217;s 470 teams and have for the past 15 years also been working in the US sailing system with the top juniors.<\/p>\n<p>Having brought 9 of the 12 NZ team members thru from Optis to the Olympic team and having won 17 world titles and over 60 NZ titles. (Plus numerous US national titles) I feel I can accurately give a comparison of the two systems. \u00a0Here are my thoughts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>US sailors are over coached and seem to spend the entire summer at regattas rather than training. The ratio is 5 training days to 1 competition day.<\/li>\n<li>There is an obvious lack of a tunable boat in the system, too many lasers and look at the US laser results, awful.<\/li>\n<li>The US coaches are lazy and technically very poor, results don&#8217;t seem to count.<\/li>\n<li>The system is covered in South American coaches who, to fill there own bank accounts have pushed the 24\/7 coaching mentality (We started with some Argentino coaches in NZ but quickly got rid of them after seeing the decline in that countries results).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Zero talent identification from US sailing. My sailors have won a whole lot of US titles but not once been approached by US sailing to acknowledge this talent.<\/li>\n<li>Sailing is way too expensive in the US, thus excluding a lot of the hungry, driven athletes, again everyone has their hand out. Regattas have turned into moneymaking exercises by the clubs involved, with a prime example in the Buzzards Bay Regatta, which is hugely expensive to enter and has the worst race management I have ever seen. Why is there a constant fight amongst the clubs involved in this regatta to hold the event? Profit.<\/li>\n<li>The US collegiate system is the best racing in the world but produces debt-ridden sailors who are great sprint racers but need to be retrained for Olympic work as the tuning knowledge just isn\u2019t there.<\/li>\n<li>Most of the US-born coaches are ex-collegiate coaches. Can no one else see the problem here?<\/li>\n<li>Money and covering the athletes with coaches won&#8217;t help the situation; the problem is in the youth and junior structures.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Obviously the present management and coaches need to go, and those who appointed them need to have a long hard look at themselves in the mirror.<\/p>\n<p>I have a great fondness for the US sailing scene and have had many great experiences over the years, but since I have been in this system, the numbers of sailors have dropped, the coach numbers have increased and the results have declined. Sad.<\/p>\n<p>John Morgan<br \/>\nMorgan Yacht Design<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am one of the coaches for the NZ men&#8217;s 49er and the women&#8217;s 470 teams and have for the past 15 years also been working in the US sailing system with the top juniors. Having brought 9 of the 12 NZ team members thru from Optis to the Olympic team and having won 17 &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/?p=4085\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">ANOTHER THOUGHT ABOUT US SAILING<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1058],"tags":[1419,2556,1350],"class_list":["post-4085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-olympics","tag-john-morgan","tag-olympics","tag-us-sailing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4085"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4086,"href":"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4085\/revisions\/4086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}