A San Diego Yacht Club Teaching Children Responsibility

Southwestern Yacht Club offers sailing lessons to kids as young as five, and in past years, taught two children who grew up to become Olympic sailors. Veronica Carter and Bret Burkhart spoke with the junior program director, Jackie Hollander, and the adult sabot sailing coach, Dee Van Horne.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Southwestern Yacht Club near Point Loma in the Laplia Cove
area offers sailing lessons to kids as young as five.
This is Coco in the Community. Is brought to you
by Simper Home and we spoke with the junior program director,
Jackie Hollander.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
So tell me a little bit about what you guys do.

Speaker 3 (00:17):
We run a sailing program for kids here in San
Diego during the school year. It's an after school program
offering classes for a variety of skill levels, and during
the summer as well. We take kids as young as
five in our Starfish program and then have a racing
program all the way through teenage.

Speaker 4 (00:34):
Yeers the practical sense of learning this skill, how will
that carry into other parts of their lives when they
grow up.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
That's my favorite question to honestly answer. We're teaching sailing
as a skill here right now, and there's a lot
of different components that are going on. I mean, we're
putting an eight year old in a boat by themselves,
and they are going to be able to sail that
boat by themselves after our two week program. And what
they don't realize they're learning how to sail in those
two weeks is how to multitask, how to be aware

(01:04):
of your surroundings, how to problem solve, how to be independent.
And one of the best things that I always love
to tell and sell parents on is if you put
your kids in sailing at a young age, when you
go to get them their driver's license at sixteen, I
guarantee you they pass on their first try because they
already are so aware of how to be a responsible person,
like on the water, which completely translates to being on

(01:27):
the road.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Do they get addicted to it and then their parents
are having to get them their own boat?

Speaker 3 (01:31):
Oh yeah, all the time. And it's great because a
lot of these parents didn't get the opportunity to learn
how to sail when they were a kid, and so
they're definitely like kind of like living through their child's experiences.
And a lot of times I hear the parents being like, so,
can we get a boat and he can take us out?
I'm like, yeah, there's definitely kids who become very quickly

(01:51):
more advanced at sailing and boating and anything safety on
the water than some of these parents who just didn't
get to have that experience.

Speaker 4 (01:58):
You know, you have to wait till you a driver's license,
to drive, right, but to be able to be eight
years old and then have that responsibility of taking passengers, yeah,
out on a boat. That's a huge, like you mentioned,
a huge responsibility that you're teaching them, you know, how
to keep your passengers safe.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
Yeah. Absolutely. And it's interesting because at eight they're learning
this really incredible, very complex, difficult skill, but they don't
even realize the complexity behind it right this to them,
it's just become second nature to most of these kids.
Then there's other kids who definitely do recognize that, and
those are the ones that I kind of really enjoy
because you can see they're like, I'm in charge, I

(02:38):
know what I'm doing, and we're keeping these people safe.
You know, that's the really cool thing.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
And I'm sure the parents tell you that that translates
into other aspects of their life.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yes, I mean, like I said, it really teaches problem solving,
It really teaches patience, it really teaches independence, and it
really just teaches being responsible because you know, these kids
can't go on the water until like a pretty long
checklist of things has been completed. I'm reminded all the
time how really impressive it is and cool it is
to see these kids do that all right.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Well, if you were wondering, what do these kids do afterwards? Yeah, exactly.
Two Olympic sailors, Brianna Provencia and Caleb Payne were enrolled
at the yacht club's junior program as kids.

Speaker 5 (03:20):
Oh it's awesome.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
They both went on to compete in the Rio de
Janeiro twenty sixteen Olympics. So we also talked to de
van Horn. She's been a sailing coach there for seventeen
years now.

Speaker 5 (03:34):
Many of my sailors are the parents of our junior
sailors here because they see their kids learning all of
these wonderful skill sets, they too want to learn those
skill sets.

Speaker 4 (03:46):
Oh interesting, and so how happy are parents to be
able to put them in a summer camp like this,
I mean this is considered a summer.

Speaker 5 (03:53):
Camp, right, absolutely, yes, they are very thrilled to put
these kids into the summer program here at Southwestern Yacht Club.
And then they come down here. They get to actually
go down on the docks, watch their children's sail take video,
take pictures and see their progression over the couple of
weeks that we have with them. And then the parents,
you know, they see that and they go, I want

(04:14):
to do that, And then I talked to them, I said, well,
come join my sab At sailing class for the adults.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
How many boats do you think it's sold just because
of these classes?

Speaker 5 (04:22):
Oh my goodness, I have no clue. I wouldn't even
know where to even start.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
But there's lots to get into it.

Speaker 5 (04:29):
After they take your class, absolutely, Well, what happens is,
you know, some of these kids age out, so after
seventeen or eighteen, either they're too tall or they're going
off to college, so they sell their boat to one
of the other up and coming junior sailors. So a
lot of these boats go through generations of different sailors,
So not so many brand new boats, but definitely generational

(04:50):
sole boats.