Thursday, November 16, 2017
Thursday, November 2, 2017
Regatta Report- The Once and Future Team Race Champs
The winners always get to write history and its easy to look back on past events and say "of course it was headed for this." Sure, there were signs and omens along the way, and we had a solid process, but 3 weeks ago LYC's chances of being the first Americans to repeat at Berlin Opti Team Cup Champions seemed far from destined. Two of the best Opti team racers the US has ever seen, Mitchell and Justin Callahan had decided to move on to other classes, the 31-0 National Championship Win in late July being their final hurrah in the class. The Callahans were special talents who's helped build our team race culture and system at LYC and their achievements - OTC, Midwinters, 2 Nationals, a Marco Rizzotti, and 1 and 2 Team Race World Championships respectively will stand the test of time even in the amnesia prone Opti Class. But time waits for no man and the present is the only time in which you can live - it was to us to use the short weeks afforded since the end of the Spring Team Qualifier to make the new iteration of LYC1 the best possible.
You don't find a new person to replace the departed talent; instead the 3 remaining sailors would all have to step up, each in their own way to form a new "big 3." I chose Stephan Baker to replace Mitchell as Team captain because in addition to being the best individual sailor in the country, he had shown an ability to see the entire race course. Below is his near perfect answer to the most abstract question I gave the sailors on a Team Race Quiz last spring.
add edit: 3rd from pin White boat should hang in there until she can pick up /leebow Black W.
Connor Boland had been on a tear all fall in the fleet racing, finishing 5th in the STQ (making his 4th consecutive National Team) and challenging the upperclassmen in High School practices Tuesdays and Thursdays. He was brimming with confidence and ready to step up. Sara Schuman had great speed and pretty good instincts - we needed to keep her improving on the start line and keeping poised in pressure situations. Above all, the big 3 would need to learn to trust each other on the racecourse as if they were blood.
To fill the 4th spot on the team (Opti team race teams sail 4 sailors at a time, but can have up to 5 on a roster) we had an excruciatingly close decision between 4 sailors, Jack Redmond, Lulu Hamilton, Ryan Konrad and Lucy Meagher. Knowing Berlin to be a very long course with typically light wind (ha!), and seeing with Pilo that Jack and Lulu were trending in a steep upward direction in their fleet racing and boathandeling, I chose those two. To their immense credit both Ryan and Lucy helped us prepare in practices leading up to the regatta, competing in practices as equals with the rest of LYC 1, contributing to our Skype Conference Calls and taking their own initiative to continue their education in advanced Team Racing and support their comrades. They share credit for our success and should basically be considered a part of the team. While Jack and Lulu vindicated our evaluation on their fleet racing, both making the National Team at the STQ, there were struggles the first practice weekend! Jack had intensely studied and learned the playbook on paper but needed more reps to actualize it. Lulu needed to improve her rules knowledge. Ryan sailed a really good practice and Lucy showed strong leadership of LYC 2 at the LYC Team Race:
Me: "Cody, who is your master?"
Cody: "Lucy!"
Me: "Good job Cody"
LISOT Black's Vanessa Larkamph at the LYC Team Race- she is one of the best team racers in the US right now.
Part of our culture at LYC is that everybody learns team racing. I think it is important for kids to get exposed to a team sport as well an individual one. Team sports teach us to deal with failure, unequal opportunities and situations on which you are reliant on others and can fail because of them! When you realize that to win you have to not only raise the level of yourself but of your teammates, then you git it! Learn how to do this and you will be good at life.
The first regatta was tough. The pre-seeded tiers format of the LYC Team Race thrust our new team into the heat of battle right off the bat. We had a good start and a 1st,3rd,4th on the reach leg before CRYC's Jonathan Siegel did an excellent job slowing the race down. He twice jibed to starboard just as an unsuspecting opponent was sailing into a leeward overlap. I diagramed the move after the regatta:
If, at position 3 A (Jonathan at the LYCTR) contacts X, then it should be A's foul for "Acquiring Right of way" and not "Initially giving room to keep clear." Rule 15. However, because A jibes back to port and allows X to keep clear she fulfills this obligation. Having slowed the race down, Jonathan's teammates passed a few of ours and they ended up in a 1,2,3. We then lost a heartbreaker to LISOT Black and had to come back up through the ranks to have a decent seed for the knockout. We won the first knockout round over LISOT Gold but then lost twice in the semis to Black again. They had a good start strategy that Connor was too dehydrated to properly defend, and they executed really well at Mark 3 - the leeward mark. We finished 3rd for the regatta.
Overall it was good for the team that Stephan had said on a conference call something to the effect that he wanted the team to get good for a long time - we chose to look at this regatta as a learning experience. The positives were that we had been close, and that Lulu sailed some good races Saturday while Jack improved demonstrably from the previous weekend by Sunday. My message was that each of our top 3 sailors had to do better with individual mach-ups vs the other team. I told them they were loosing ones I though they could win.
We then shifted the focus away from the regatta and to Germany, where there would be no Leeward mark traps on the Trapezoid course - we'll have to learn Mark 3 another day.
The OTC Course Diagram
- the bottom reach actually has more kick to it than in this diagram.
Out of the Florida heat, on a 10 hour planeride, and into dreary Fall Germany. The Hotel Petit is a ten minute walk from the Potsdamer Yacht Club on Lake Wannassee. The yachting scene is incredible - Wannassee is kind of like the Annapolis of Berlin. Almost 30 Folkboats were out racing all day up the lake on a freezing cold Saturday! J70's pranced around between the 2 Opti courses with Spinnakers and rail meat in full winter garb. After recuperating in the Hotel for 16 hours I went down to the club and collected the charter boats - Winners shipped from Worlds with the Thai Pizza stickers still on the bows! Kim, the dude from Winner had to take them off with a heat gun and a knife as we were to be assigned bow and stern numbers for team racing. I tightened the mast collars, set the rakes (FORWARD 1/4" of the kids usual rake for flat water) and finished just as the kids showed up, rigged and went sailing.
Thursday night practice is really important when you're sailing a weekend regatta in a foreign country. You get some exercise and being in nature you body senses that the sun is about to set. We sailed just over an hour doing mostly boathandeling. Then we practice raced some guys with NED on their sail, lost, but gave them a good race. With 3 sailors from Worlds and a girl who had been to Germany last year we recognized the Dutch would be one of our toughest opponents. I wanted the kids to get used to the international speed and intensity, but it somehow transpired that both teams were laughing for most of the race! As a get-a-feel for this place practice it was perfect.
Friday began with a team run around the lake. It started raining but we pushed through, acclimating to the cold!
Just before Friday practice I got the rotation and saw we were going to be on Course Bravo, the farther out, more exposed and thus windier and choppier of the two racecourses. The year before we had sailed mostly on Alpha, but won the finals on Bravo. So to get experience we plained out on a reach for 20 minutes, team racing 3v2 the whole way to a distant mark in the Bravo cove. Except that we didn't team race because the team of 2, Sara and Lulu passed everyone and it turned into a game of Chase. This was a valuable lesson. We spent most of the day running 3v2 around a starboard triangle - a beat and the two reach angles that would be new to us. The kids were competitive on the reaches and we got experience trying to balance upwind in the wind shifts. Balance is a key concept in team racing and can be defined two ways:
We are balanced when we are on the same ladder rung.
We are balanced when my teammate across the course is ahead of my opponent I am covering
(and vise versa).
If a team in a 1,2,3 gets unbalanced, then they are really only in 1,2,4, or 1,3,4. If the other team brings the unbalanced pairs together, then we have a team race! In Germany the shifts and puffs were insane and it was really hard to balance. We made the conscious decision to not worry about it soo much on the first beat and really try to sail the shifts and fleet race. As a coach you are always trying to prioritize what will win the regatta based on the conditions, and this strategy played into our team's strength in addition to the long courses with muti-shift beats.
Finally, the "Banana Triangle" as this drill shill be called (1,2,5 vs 3,4 invokes the "Split the Banana" concept) got pretty good and we raced the Dutch one more time, as well as handling the Norwegians once. Connor was soo cold from being inappropriately dressed that I sent him in for the Netherlands race and we lost another close one with Jack and Lulu sailing. There was a lot of tape to break down on the iPad and my dad's wooden cutout boats to push around the table as we addressed our mistakes after dinner.
The reaches were going to be where we would have to win during this regatta. We have a saying in team racing:
"Be predictable to your teammates and enigmatic to your opponents"
Crushing the opposition on the reaches would not just be about boatspeed, we had to know who/when/how to to separate to push the race forward, to make execution easier for the teammate "playing back" as well as the "Pusher." After our full team strategic meeting I met individually with each team member to talk with them about what the team would need from them.
Sara and Conner Going high on the reach leg while Stephan sets "move of death"
Going high on the bottom reach! Over the top again!
"A good king is first in every charge and last in every defeat"
I think he lived by it in always supporting his teammates after a race, taking ownership of his mistakes and saying "I think..." before giving constructive guidance to a teammate or to me. I saw a little bit of Arthur's experiential education in all of the kids; we would go into the German Woods as Warts and hope to come out as Arthurs.
Jack doing some winter sledding.
Fast forward through the morning rigging, the opening-picture-taking ceremony, the sail out, to the start of the first race. Sweden doesn't know the start sequence and has the time wrong. We pretend to start a minute early with them, then sail downwind and clear before them after the real gun. But there is a little too much confusion and the race committee decides the re-start the race. They do it again and we are shocked! I had carefully gone over the 13 minute rolling start sequence with the team the night before. It and the 2 course, 3 stage round-robin format are two beautiful bits of German engineering, and we were surprised the PRO had thrown a wrench in the machine! It really hurt when we the Sweeds started fine the 3rd time, and beat us in a heated battle with team racing on every leg.
The conditions were extreme for Florida sailors: Gusts to 27kts and Temps below 50F. We were 0-1. Time to do some sailing! In the SWE loss the race had been slowed soo much the fleet behind caught up to us -this was not the type of game we wanted to play. We made a conscious effort to fleet race better on the beats and to send a boat that was in trouble to one of the corners where the sailors said there were shore-line lifts. On the reaches we would make our moves and plane over the top! We never again had a slow race and we never again lost. We threw large sections of the playbook out the window - almost no team racing on the first beat allowed - and just kept hammering the split-push concepts. We revived the play I call "12 Gap" - the 1,2 keeping the 1,2 while teammates in the back of the fleet work together to beat someone.
It was basically a dare to the other team. You can't possibly balance us all the way to the finish with these shifts and our boatspeed. We understood the balance concept to be sure, we just turned it against the other team. It wasn't pretty team racing, but we won a lot of races 1,2,6,7; 1,2,5,8 etc.
Lulu and Jack were getting lit up in a couple puffs, and Connor twice got stuck in irons by a crazy wind-swirl by Mark 1. The sailors had to hike all beat, then hike all reaches to keep boatspeed around the course. To actually improve throughout a day like this, with all the physical and mental strain, says something good about these sailors. We continued to get better at our spacing and anticipation of each other's moves relative to the opponent.
But by the NED race (as we had taken to calling the Dutch), the last of the day, Lulu was tired. She started over the line by 4 inches and went back super late - Sara called to Connor who called to Stephan who called to Lulu, but it took to long! She was deep 8 and hiking her butt off all the way up the first beat. We were close to a 2,3,4 and ended up slowing down the race a lot, so Lulu got back in it.
There was a wicked puff maybe 30kts as the fleet barreled into the leeward mark. A NED stuck Lulu up with a "bump and run" move and in the puff she had to tack around to make the mark. Again she is deep 8 and now we're in a 1,2,6,8 with a couple NEDs team racing hard on Sara in 6th. After they moved her to 7th, Sara played it beautifully, consolidating an imbalance twice to temporarily take a boat out on starboard. While the NED's were re-doing this passback for the 3rd time, Lulu sprang back into the picture and was streaming for the finish line on Starboard! A NED boat lee bowed her and stuck her up head to wind, but in this moment all 3 boats, Lulu and 2 NEDs all shot the finish line and Lulu beat them both by just four inches! If the NEDs win that shootout, they probably win the regatta. It was a gritty performance by Laura Hamilton and some great team racing and awareness by Sara Schumann.
We got off the water to find we were tied for first place with a 10-1 record; we hadn't known anything that was happening on the other course. We prioritized rest and warmth over socialization. I debriefed only with boats - no video and went over what we had been learning intuitively so it could be better standardized for everyone tomorrow. Sunday brought dangerous conditions for most of the day - mid 40's and gusting as much. The beautifully engineered bracket could be easily terminated at that stage, we just needed a Finals! We were loosing the tiebreaker to Poland, under Appendix D, by 0.2 points!
The front pushed through, the wind blew itself out, and we went out for the finals set for 2:30pm. Sweden and the NEDs would sail the consolation, while we would face Poland for the Regatta, in a best of 3 series. The sun came out briefly as Connor sprayed his wardrobe all over my coachboat in changing to lighter gear - both good omens as they had preceded the finals last year. Jack had given exemplary answers in the team meeting the night before, the gleam of understanding in his eye. I saw him lay down one confident roll-tack, and decided he would start the finals.
Stephan, left and Jack crossing the fleet in the Finals.
The first race we had a chance to loose on the first leg - the Polish started well and we bid a bad job getting sucked into a blender drill in the middle of the first beat instead of getting out and fleet racing. For a moment Jack was the only thing keeping them from having a 1,2,3. Then Connor luffed a windward boat, drew a foul that he presented well to the umpire, and got a call that put us on more stable footing. The entire team chipped in on the reaches and last beat, when we finished 2,3,4,6 - a solid Play 2 with a Play 78 emergency built in. The next race we started better and stuck to our guns on the long, favored tack. Jack, Sara and Stephan should have had a 1,2,3; they settled for a 1,2,4 with Stephan in 4th. Sara began to team race to "clean it up" but Stephan called her off around mark 3 when he saw a pressure line he could roll the opponent on. He got briefly clear ahead, and when the Poll tried to drive him the wrong side of Mark 4, he kept clear, protested, and got the call. Poland spun for the Rule 17 Proper Course violation, and Jack, Sara and Stephan finished 1,2,3. Connor had done the dirty work on the start line and the first part of the beat, occupying 2 Polish boats and dragging them out of phase. All the kids brought the best version of themselves to the finals and we took them 2-0 to win the 30th Opti Team Cup. It was Connor's 2nd win, putting him in the company of Poland's, Kacper Zieminski and Germany's Felix Tone as the only 2 time Cup winners, while Germany's Nikolaus Mattig stands alone with 3 wins. 
The rest of the night is kind of a blur - we packed charters, rushed to shower and took Lulu to get groomed at "Das Futter House," received awards with the "Star Spangled Banner" playing, took a train to Berlin, walked around, took a train back, packed, slept and traveled all the next day. Nothing gets in the way of an education like your schooling and I wished the kids had another day to shlep around Berlin, see some museums and actually process some of the History (I did this last year with a couple local umpires). Just once when you sit down with your school to explain "why are you taking off soo much time from school for sailing/world travel" I wish the administrator would say "why don't you take off more time?!"
Still, despite the hardships and ensuing sleep deprivation, there was a glow around the kids of knowing we had accomplished something unprecedented. They were still crazy maniacs - pushing each other onto train tracks, spitting on the Berlin wall, and starring in Dutch music videos (ok only one of those things actually happened, but all 3 were considered) . But now they are a Team of crazy maniacs, and one that knows they can do once again what LYC teams have done before: become the Once and Future team race champions.
Regatta Video.
Photos available - Copyright Hans Glave
OTC Website.
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