Monday, June 15, 2009

Mommy Boats: The Other Side of the Argument


There has been a whole lot of discussion in the comments to my post calling to Ban Mommy Boats NOW. In the interests of fairness, I am also posting this email from James Barton who seems to know a lot more about the practices at major US Optimist championships than I do...
Tillerman may be being a bit tough on our current crop of Opti sailors.

For those of you who have never been to an Opti Championship, here's how it breaks down: Most big regattas require that every sailor have a coach or a parent on the water, remember these are little kids, often 8 or 9 years old. Most of the kids are members of a Yacht Club Team, or other Racing Team of some sort, that already has a coach. Teams over 9 or 10 sailors sometimes have two coaches. Small teams some times "join forces" as there are two or three races going on at the same time.

I am not aware of anyone at this years team trials who had a private coach, although I have seen it at other regattas. There is absolutely nothing wrong with coaches taking wind readings and passing them along to the team before the start. Although at the Team Trials I have attended, the race committees were very communicative and broadcast all race committee activities on VHF radio for everyone to hear. If you want to know the wind direction at the weather mark, all you had to do was listen to your radio.

These coaches are rarely highly paid and perform a great service to the sport by teaching the kids, respect for the rules, and respect for each other. To think that any of them are teaching the kids to cheat is ridiculous.
JB


Thanks James. Always good to hear well reasoned arguments from both sides of the issue.

I guess I have no real objection to the use of coach boats at Optimist and other junior regattas if, as you imply, all sailors have equal access to support and information from the coaches (which does not seem to have been the case at the event
covered at Youth Coaching which triggered this whole current debate.)

I'm still not convinced that it's fair at any regatta for only some sailors to have this advantage. And I am totally against the use of Mommy Boats at events for REAL Laser sailors such as Laser Masters events. Ban Mommy Boats NOW.

4 comments:

Litoralis said...

"Most big regattas require that every sailor have a coach or a parent on the water, remember these are little kids, often 8 or 9 years old. Most of the kids are members of a Yacht Club Team, or other Racing Team of some sort, that already has a coach."

So, an individual sailor is at a severe disadvantage or may not even be able to enter a big regatta. That's a problem.

"The race committees were very communicative and broadcast all race committee activities on VHF radio for everyone to hear. If you want to know the wind direction at the weather mark, all you had to do was listen to your radio."

Do Optimists carry VHF radios now? I know that handheld ones are cheap now, but seriously, what happened to reading the wind on the water?

Tillerman said...

I first came across this "every sailor must have a coach or a parent on the water" rule many years ago. Litoralis (Tillerman son #1 for those not in the know) was around 13, I think, and I tried to register him for one of those US Sailing Junior Olympic events at Larchmont YC. I had taken him to various other junior regattas before and just done my usual thing of pushing him off and letting him fend for himself in the racing, and I don't think it did him much harm.

But Larchmont were adamant... if you didn't have a Mommy Boat (and I didn't own one or know anyone else who did) then little Lito couldn't sail in the event.

It broke his little heart and he's never been the same since.

(That last line was a joke.)

Litoralis said...

Exactly. It's easy for someone to say that Mommy Boats aren't a problem because everyone has them when they inhabit a world where anyone without a Mommy Boat is not allowed to sail.

Anonymous said...

Before I even read the comments, I was also going to use the Larchmont JO example. My kid - a little younger than L - had no YC affiliations, and he had asked me to sign him up in the Larchmont JO, in Radials.

When I tried, I was told the he needed a coach boat, so I asked if he could just put his lunch and bottle of water on one of theirs.

They said no, but since we were from NJ (with what I took as a less than complimentary tone) we'd have to talk to one of the Jersey Shore teams and hook up with them. Now our latitude is actually slightly north of Larchmont, I think, and we're maybe an hour away, while the Jersey Shore teams were at least two hours south of both us and Larchmont.

We called the Jersey teams, and they said it wouldn't be fair to the kids' families who were funding those teams, coaches, and boats, for them to be his lunch-carrying boat.

So my son canceled and they sent the entry fee back.

That whole mommy boat thing struck me as particularly elitist.

BB

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