Sailing suffers without youth retention

Dear Curmudgeon: Sailing is, first and foremost, a sport, a sport of the highest achievements, which is included in the Olympic Games. For a sports sailing club, its main goal is to find as many children as possible who are predisposed to sailing. To do this, we shouldn’t create programs to retain children, but rather to select the most talented children.

Children quit not only in sailing, but in all sports. This is a normal process in sports. If there aren’t enough children, it means the initial training groups were poorly recruited, that’s all. Dwelling about children dropping out of sailing is just covering up for one’s own poor or substandard work. – Podium or bust

Dear Podium: Unlike nearly all youth sports, sailing is not one they need to age out of. There are a lot of sports options for kids in the USA, and youth sailing modeled itself after other sports when it was restructured in the 1980s. The result was predictable. Since most kids quit other sports in their teen years, that now happens with sailing too. The trophy winning kids stay in sailing, and if the others are not exposed to other sailing options outside of the limited youth menu, it is not hard for them to quit. If retention is not a priority, the sport suffers. – The Curmudgeon