Online coaching

Paul Brotherton talks to us about his new distance learning tool

The role of the sailing coach has evolved rapidly over the past few years – moving out of the exclusive domain of Olympic training and America’s Cup and onto the weekend warrior’s sailing calendar at some point.

A highly talented individual in a rib, complete with video camera and wet-notes remains an expensive way to make significant progress in your sailing however. For some top level yacht campaigns this expense is easily justified, but for the more modest programme it is prohibitive. One of the ways around this has been to club together –either as a small group or a class – and all benefit from some wise words and split the cost. This down side of this is that when the day, or weekend is over, it can be quickly back to the old habits and where does the next improvement come from?

Coaching is much more than pointing out the obvious and top level campaigns rely on a structured programme with goals and measured achievements to bring out the best in their sailors. It is with this in mind that My Sailing Coach has been launched – an online ‘distance learning’ product which aims to provide the sailor with continuity and discipline in his sailing development while delivering valuable technique coaching.

The brains behind the site are Paul Brotherton and Dave McNamara, who aim to sign up sailors to their online coaching programme and provide one-on-one help, study aids, tutorials, exercises, and feedback over the course of a well defined training programme.

Brotherton, who is no stranger to readers of TheDailySail, says his new venture is an attempt to disseminate the Brotherton School of Coaching to a broad an audience as possible. He has personally sailed at the highest level for many years and alongside this had a very active role as a coach. Students have varied from the likes of Ellen MacArthur to club sailors via his Zap Sailing brand.

McNamara has been doing all of the web design work involved. The pair go back to 1997 when they won the Laser 5000 Eurocup together and in the intervening years McNamara has among many other projects worked with cyclist Lance Armstrong’s coach developing and online coaching aid.

The initial concept for the website is to make coaching available to a wider audience of all levels of ability. Brotherton believes that the amount of people that can benefit from this service is significant, saying that, as a basic rule of thumb anyone who is serious about their sailing could benefit from coaching.

“Being a serious sailor does not necessarily mean being a full time or even good sailor, someone that has just started sailing a few months ago could be serious about wanting to improve and with proper coaching they can do that a lot quicker,” explains Brotherton. He also believes that even the best people that are really serious about their training, and who are out on the water all the time, often do not really know how to train.

Following ten years of serious coaching Brotherton has developed a system that he finds very effective based around a five point teaching technique. Starting, handling, speed, decision making and execution are the identified areas, and these form the foundation for the MySailingCoach system.

At first glance the site offers a personal communication channel with your coach, but the personalisation goes much further than just this. When someone first joins up to the site they fill out a questionnaire that forms the basis of their initial training period (example question bellow.) This contains a number of questions and self analysis scores and is designed to give the coach a solid knowledge base about where you are with your sailing and what your aims are.



From this and from an initial telephone conversation that each new member has with their coach a training schedule is designed specifically for each person. “If someone put a nine for their motivation levels, in my follow up phone call with that person I will say a nine for me means that at five in the morning when it is raining you will get up and go running if that is what you need to do. If someone put five or six then I will assume if it is a sunny force four then they will just go and have a blast around for a bit on the water with a little bit of structure for half an hour,” says Brotherton.

After this training schedule has been decided upon everything goes onto the individual’s calendar page, on which they can add and remove personal dates, sailing events, etc. This gives each person using the site a clear view of what they have got to do in the coming weeks.

In addition to this on every member’s personal homepage there is a section where each week’s targets are inputted by the coach, after each training session the member types in how much they have done. Next to the text one of four symbols comes up, either a tick to show that the exercise has been done, a cross to show that it has not been done, a plus to show that more than the required amount has been done or a minus to show that less than the required amount has been done. From this the coach is able to identify at a glance exactly what has been achieved and leave a member a message on their personal message board relating to the exercise. In this way each individual’s training schedule will be able to be adjusted to suit their immediate need if required.

The site does not just consist of an organising and managing system. Online are huge amounts of tutorials giving detailed advice on how to do certain exercises and giving technique hints. Not all of these are available to everyone and there are two primary reasons for this. “The tutorials are encoded so they will only work if you get sent the link to access them. The reasons for this are, to stop people signing up for a month and then walking off with all the available information on the site. Also and most importantly if you get an enthusiastic person they will come in and devour everything and learn nothing because there is so much information there. That is the reason your coach sends you the link, they decide what is relevant to your sailing programme,” explains Brotherton.

There are five initial tutorials and with each tutorial there are a set of associated exercises, the coach will nominate different exercises for the sailors to do depending on their level. For example in the first section on handling there is a whole section on power balance and feel and this covers things like: How does the wind change? How does that change the balance of the boat? What is balance? How do the mechanics of the boat work? Then there are a number of exercises that go along with that that to show people how their boat works.

In addition to these individual items on each person’s homepage there is also a forum that everyone can post on and the top three posts from this appear on everyone’s homepage. This, Brotherton explains, will hopefully build a community feel so that members can help out other members and ask questions like: ‘Where is a good place to stay in Rutland?’

Although this is the creation of Brotherton and McNamara they do not see it staying as just them forever. “The intention is to bring in coaches that I have worked with in the past and trust to do work in specific areas. There are also a lot of very good sailors out there that do not have the facility to organise their own coaching, we can give them the facilities to do that,” he says. The vision seems to be largely as a tool that Brotherton and McNamara own but other coaches use to coach people through. It is perhaps possible to imagine some Olympic sailors and coaches or even Olympic teams using this system for long distance coaching if it is required and it will be interesting to see if that happens.

Although enthusiastic about the opportunity to be able to reach a broader range of people and so help more people improve their sailing. Brotherton is not unrealistic about the obvious weaknesses of the system: “When you get a coach normally they will come and look at you on the water and say you need to do this or that. Obviously we are not able to do that so we need to be really good at communicating, we have to make sure that our exercises and tutorials are top notch and we have to make sure that the questions that we ask in the first instance give us an appropriate understanding of where that sailor is and what their ambition is. We are certainly not saying that a sailor should not get additional coaching we think that on the water coaching is extremely valuable but the truth is most people probably do not get anything.”

Signing up to MySailingCoach.com is priced at £20 per month, this includes all the online resources, feedback from coaches, the initial set up phone conversation and if you stay for a year then a quarterly phone conversation with your coach to discuss progress and goals. In addition to this there will be the opportunity to set up on the water coaching days either individually or in groups of about ten.

The site is not a substitute for a coach that comes out and follows you around in a rib and chats with you at the end of the day. What it does offer is a new perspective on the world of coaching and how you as a sailor, sitting there at your desk, can embark on a structured programme that will ultimately improve your sailing – without breaking the bank. A distance learning course for competitive sailors.

MySailingCoach will be at the RYA Dinghy Sailing Show this weekend on stand B35.