Whether you’re putting together a crew for a new yacht or have been racing for years, finding and managing a regular crew can be a challenge.
We’ve complied these 5 steps for building a winning race crew, and explain how MySail can help you plan your race schedule, manage your crew and find new crew to join your team.
1. Work out your team objectives
The first step in building a winning sailing crew is to work out your team objectives.
Whether it’s to be the number one IRC yacht in the country, compete in your yacht’s first significant offshore event or complete every race in your yacht club’s twilight series, your objectives will have a big effect on your team requirements.
Also think about the characteristics of your yacht and program. Is your yacht professionally run and highly competitive, social and relaxed, or suitable for training new crew? Be up-front with this; it will help you lock in the right crew for your program and make sure everyone has a good time.
Creating your MySail yacht profile provides a good opportunity to think about your yacht’s objectives and characteristics, and a place to record and share these with your crew. Click here to find out more about creating and managing your yacht profile.
2. Organise your sailing program
The next step is to organise your sailing program.
If you know your objectives or have sailed for many years, chances are you have already worked this out. If not, check out this article covering 5 Tips to Help Plan Your Race Schedule for some tips and ideas about this.
You can schedule your races in MySail. This provides an easy way to keep track of your schedule and share it with your crew. Click here to find out more about managing your race schedule in MySail.
3. Start with who you know
Sailing program set? It’s time to lock in your crew.
If you have an established crew from previous race seasons, you’re already most of the way there! The next step is to share your planned race program with your crew and lock in their availability and commitment.
MySail provides a great way to do this, too. First, use the My Crew page to add all of your existing crew to your yacht’s team in MySail; as well as a place to centrally manage your crew, this provides additional features such as adding crew notes and accessing emergency contact details. Click here to find out more.
Now, remember those races and other events you have already scheduled in step 2? For each race or event, you can select which crew you’d like to attend, and invite them along.
You can view exactly who is attending and who can’t make it to each event in your MySail schedule, as well as easily message your race crew for each event, and assign race positions. Only crew who you invite will see a particular event, so if you have different crew for different types of races, this can easily be managed in the platform.
4. Find new sailors
Now that you’ve invited your regular crew, it’s easy to see where you have any gaps in crew numbers or skills.
Time to find some new crew!
MySail Connect provides an easy way to share your sailing program and crew requirements, and find new crew. Set-up your yacht profile so interested crew can find and message you directly, or browse the crew profiles and message crew that look suitable for your program.
Once you find someone who’d like to join your team, you can easily add them to your yacht’s crew list and invite them to events right from their crew profile – click here to find out how. (We recommend using the Message function to chat with potential crew members to determine their suitability and interest before inviting them to join your crew list).
5. Get the team together
Now that you’ve built a great crew, the last step is to get everyone together.
Find time for some training or a social event before your first race of the season – this gives everyone a chance to get to know each other, and, if you haven’t been sailing for a while, blow off some of the cobwebs.
So that you and your team can keep everything in once place, MySail also provides the ability to schedule social events, training and boat work days right in the same place as your race schedule.
