The 2025 junior sailing season set sail in style on Saturday, June 21, with the highly anticipated JSA of LIS All Instructor Symposium held at the SUNY Maritime College. This annual event brought together sailing instructors, coaches, head instructors, and program directors from across the region for a dynamic one-day workshop designed to jump-start the season and foster a collective vision for excellence in junior sailing programs.

The Symposium’s 27-person teaching team covered 29 individual sessions. The mornings ran as many as four simultaneous tracks, and the afternoon’s rigging and handling demos – held mostly on the lawn, dock, or in the boathouse – ran with seven concurrent sessions.

The symposium offered an opportunity for the instructing staff to participate in JSA programs to connect, collaborate, and learn from each other. Through a series of engaging sessions led by notable keynote speakers, visiting experts, and local JSA Head Instructors, Coaches and Sailing Directors attendees gained valuable tools, tips, and techniques to enhance their teaching, coaching, and mentorship skills.

Participants benefited from hands-on clinics, interactive demonstrations, and thought-provoking discussions, all aimed at helping them become even more effective leaders and educators for the next generation of sailors.

This year’s symposium featured an outstanding lineup of presenters, each bringing their own expertise and passion for sailing education:

• Coach Read Maltbie’s keynote address inspired instructors to lead with purpose with the goal to ensure that they impart a lasting, positive, and memorable experience to each sailor in their programs to “keep kids in boats longer.” Titled, The Art of Situational Leadership: Learning when and how to step up as a leader, Coach Reed included the audience in sharing experiences, recognizing themselves as professionals. It pumped them up and set the stage for the rest of the day. Coach Reed is past executive director at the Intercollegiate Sailing Association, TedX speaker, highly sought-after performance coach, regularly-featured US Sailing conference keynote speaker, and author of the bestseller The Spartan Mindset.
• Daniel Escudero is the 2024 College Single-Handed National Champion and North American Champion, and is on the ILCA Olympic development team. His session – Finding and Sharing the Joy in Sailing – A High Performance Take – drew on 15 years of experience as both participant and coach that shared sports psychology insights and coaching strategies that most effectively keep sailors engaged, motivated, and passionate about the sport. (His graduation ceremony at the Webb Institute followed that afternoon.)
• Robert Crafa’s afternoon keynote (The Mullet: Professional in the Front, Fun in the Back) was a fresh departure from typical speaker events. The mullet-wig wearing SUNY Maritime Waterfront Director’s after lunch session was an out-of-seat, full-engagement affair that had instructors practicing how to be safe and have fun setting their sailors and themselves up for the best summer. The long-time educator taught them how to engage their audience, have an instructor impact, and have fun while doing it. You had to see it to believe it.
• Jean Walker Sinclair’s 5 Things That Level 1 Didn’t Teach You That You Should Know was unsurprisingly delivered by someone who knows. Jeanne has personally trained over 900 Level 1 Smallboat Instructors and is both a US Sailing Master Instructor Trainer and a member of its National Curriculum Faculty. Attendees learned why today’s junior sailors might learn differently than earlier generations, how instructors can better accommodate their sailors’ needs, and how to deal with reluctant sailors.
• Maddy Saffer gave a crash course on theories and skills taught to pre-service educators that can be applied to sailing instruction to help coaches work with all of their students, regardless of age and skill through a presentation entitled A Classroom Teacher’s Guide to Instructing All Sailors. Maddy is a long-time Sailing Instructor at Larchmont Yacht Club and starts her classroom teaching career this fall.
• Santiago “Tino” Galan’s Drills and Tips for coaching at Regattas provided coaches with drills and tips for organizing notes, organizing sailors, and staying on top of things when racing. The session was informed by Tino’s two decades as a competitive sailor and international coach for Optimist, 29ers, 49ers, and 420 dinghy classes.
• Blair Overman held two sessions remotely via Zoom: How to engage different TYPES of sailors and What do your kids NEED from you? with the former identifying three types of kids and how to meet their needs and the other covering customizing instruction to meet sailors’ individual needs in order to make kids feel welcomed, safe, and supported. Blair is an acknowledged expert and leader in community sailing with over 20 years of experience, having served as National Program Director for the US Sailing Siebel Program, Executive Director at DC Sail, and Program Director at Camp Sea Gull.
• Jen Guimaraes’ provocatively titled Adventure Sailing – You’ve Been Doing It All Wrong: Rethinking the approach to adventure sailing for greater impact taught unconventional water drill techniques and fun ways to keep sailors engaged while improving their boat handling skills. She demonstrated a variety of fun maneuvers and how to implement them in day-to-day programming. Formerly employed at US Sailing, Jen serves on the US Sailing National Faculty, and is an avid science educator and a US Sailing Instructor Trainer. She has recently joined Tahe Outdoors.

Along with many other speakers, the symposium’s agenda was packed with valuable sessions, including:

• More Than a Job: How Sailing Instruction Sharpens Your Professional Edge explored the broader benefits of teaching sailing for non-sailing career seekers.
• Rigging Tips for All JSA Boats offered hands-on, practical demonstrations to help instructors and sailors maximize performance and safety.
• And more — see the complete Symposium agenda.

This annual symposium is more than just professional development. It helps build community and continuously raises the bar for our juniors. The JSA of LIS All Instructor Symposium connected peers, shared best practices, and engaged in active learning.

As the junior sailing season gets underway, the lessons and inspiration from this symposium will help ensure that JSA programs continue to set the standard for excellence, safety, and fun on the water.

Here’s to a successful and memorable 2025 junior sailing season!