(San Francisco, CA)- Expanding
a usual-suspects match-race competition to include a women's division
and a youth division, with shorter races, more races, and many a "Hey,
I've heard your name, nice to meet you" is a good thing!What to do when a grand event outlives its prime, but mustn't go away? It's an obvious call to "think outside the box," but there's no formula for that, is there?
Since 1967, two leading clubs on San Francisco Bay, The San Francisco Yacht Club and St. Francis Yacht Club, have maintained an annual match race rivalry. First sailed in 46-foot CCA boats and later in either sizable IOR boats or Santa Cruz sleds, with a few shots at Farr 40s, the San Francisco Cup match eventually followed the almost-inevitable path to J-built sprit boats.
Except for a few J/120 matches, the event settled into J/105s borrowed out of Fleet One. Everything was fine. For a while. But, after that while, repetition turned into A Problem. Now, it's necessary to say that different people may have different views, and your correspondent was the merde-disturber-in-chief in 2014, so this is not an independent report. But it was time for a change.
Absent opportunities to return to the glory days of custom fiftyish-footers, what to do?
One way to look at that is to ask, what is the best thing going in the moment? CCA boats had their moment. IOR boats. Santa Cruz sleds. And J/105s are not going away. But the St. Francis Yacht Club, in company with the St. Francis Sailing Foundation, in recent years undertook to build a fleet of J/22s kept primarily for match racing and team racing. What about keeping the Usual Suspects division of J/105s and leavening it with a Women's division and a Youth division from each club in J/22s? Get different parts of each club engaged with other elements of their own club, and then mix it up with the other club.
It worked. And it could work anywhere, in whatever context. In this case, it was about fulfilling the mission statement of the San Francisco Cup, which begins: "The purpose of this trophy is to promote good fellowship between the two yacht clubs."
The 2014 event proved that more is more. Youth, ladies, gunslingers, we had'em all.
The
J/105 match featured SFYC Commodore Bill Melbostad in #40 Blackhawk
with three Perkins brothers by his side (you may have heard of them) vs.
StFYC (what a difference a "t" makes) Staff Commodore Peter Stoneberg
in #196, Risk. Stoneberg's armaments included Olympians Craig Healy and
Russ Silvestri.All around, not a bad deal with two top ten-ranked women skippers and crack crews, Katie Maxim for SFYC and Nicole Breault for StFYC, where the balance went to StFYC.
Adding women's and youth divisions reset the pulse of the event. Under an agreement that the winner would be the first club to accumulate 11 points, St. Francis YC took the cup by a one-point margin in Race #21 by a scant 8 seconds. StFYC 11, SFYC 10. It can't get much closer.
Skippering the deciding win was StFYC/Stanford's Antoine Screve (bronze and silver at ISAF Youth Worlds) racing against SFYC's Jack Barton, 2013 Sears Cup champion, who brought along his Sears Cup crew of brother Sam Barton, Corey Lynch, and Sammy Shea.
Where are we now? People know people that they didn't know before. People were included who were excluded before. It's called being a club. It's called being a community, and it could work in many a context. With accumulated points determining the winner, it's doesn't matter how many divisions race, because an even number of divisions does not risk a tie. Why not a fourth division with high schoolers crewing for an adult skipper? Now that's a mentoring opportunity, eh? A masters division? One race where each side draws lots in a public setting, and all the other skippers for that club crew for the skipper who wins the draw? There are any number of ways to play this, and mixing it up is the name of the game, provided the real name of the game is fun.
I know it's an impossible standard to meet, 365 days a year, but we're here for such a little while, and, when we can, why not make life a special occasion?
Preparing to hand off the San Francisco Cup to the other side of the bay, the man who had done his part as skipper by winning SFYC's J/105 division, Commodore Bill Melbostad, declared, "I think we're onto something." Thank you for the contribution from Kimball Livingston- St Francis YC.
Sailing photo credits- Leslie Richter
http://www.rockskipper.com