Assembling and Retaining a Racing Crew — version 0.0
Assuming that winning races, improving the boat’s position on the leaderboard is a key objective. There are a few basic steps in assembling a successful racing crew.
With a clear objective we set the scene with the boundary condition.
Not all of us have an unlimited budget to pay for rockstar racers. Accept that you’ll probably have to get crew of various levels of experience and capabilities. Work to the limitations of the owner and very possible the skipper. The boat itself, if you’ve got a rocket, it sells itself, rock up to the club and a line of crew will beon the dock waiting to jump onboard. With a slower boat, you need to do a little more homework.
Succintly the boundary conditions are, budget, the race boat, crew development prospect onboard and retainment of crew.
The Core
Good crew attracts good crew!
Build a core team that shares the value and the tone of the boat. This provides a strong foundation to work with. These first two or three crew members will then attract like minded crew. Get them to vet the new members. Invite them onboard for a test sail or cruise before letting them loose on a race ideally. The core crew should be seen as mentors to all the new crew members, race training onboard and team work onshore. With time new team members will absorb the values and tone that was set from the get go.
Get the core crew members wrong, they set a bad example, bad habits spread like wildfire there is no recovery, well there is, ejection at the next port, this leaves a horrible taste in everyones mouth. It’s best to avoid this hence getting that initial midset right and the rest should fall in place.
Attracting the crew
An unlimited checkbook and a rocket is great but this is not always the case. Work on you strengths, have you got a good tactician, navigator or trimmer as core? These are huge assets as attraction of coming onboard, it gives new team members the opportunity to learn from them and grow i.e. develop.
Allow you crew to move around the boat on different positions, those long passage races get a little tedious if all you do is pack a spinnaker. Take advantage of the stabiliy on passages to teach race trim, talk through race strategy and tactics. Use good judgement, work to the limitation of your crew, don’t make one the bowman calling the start and gybing under pressure if they have not been racing for months.
On short non forgiving races best let your crew perform where they feel most comfortable. Don’t make this a habbit, if the crew are not learning or progressing they get demotivated they will not perform and eventually leave.
Nothing says you care more than letting that poor chap on the rails who is the wave breaker hold the helm sailing the boat back to port or out to the race course. This symbolic moves shows that there is potential to progress onboard. In short don’t pigeon hole your crew.
Not all days on the water go according to plan. What differentiates a good team from a weak team is how well they recover after a bad day on the water. Here are steps of dealing with a bad day, the advice holds for a good day too. Never finger point, identify what went wrong, address it, educate the team and ensure that it does not happen again. Realistically you are aiming to reduce the number of occurances of these errors. The debrief includes what went well, and what improvements can be made to improve both boat and crew performance the next time on the water.
These are the major points on assembling and retaining good crew. Each mojor point can be expanded into its own article that I might one day write.
Lastly
Crews talk to each other onshore. Each and every move onboard will be disected at the bar, note that most bar visits are longer than most races, this should be motivating enough to give your best to the crew onboard (and likewise the crew onboard).
Happy and successful racing!
