Dinghy teams members commit most of their weekends to either training or events throughout both semesters. Events are always tons of fun involving, a night out on Friday, sailing all of Saturday, a fancy dress night out on Saturday, sailing for most of Sunday. To some of you this may sound like a lot of time to commit but you won’t be able to find anything else nearly as fun or crazy to do with your weekends!
Teams also involves weekly theory and fitness sessions, we also tend to do other activities such as hill walking, movie nights, dinners and so on. Dinghy teams are one of the biggest parts of EUSC, it’s like a family and we love to have as many people part of it as possible. For more information on how to get involved contact Teams Captain Hugh Braidwood or Racing Secretary Hannah Jones: matchsec@eusc.org.uk
Team Trials
We invite any sailor with any form of racing experience (no team racing experience needed!) as well as previous team members to come to a designated weekend (normally the second weekend of semester 1) to see what potential we have for the year.
The day will start out with everyone getting to know each other and the boats, we’ll run through how to tune the rigs and the basics of racing. The rest of the day will be spent sailing with different people so that we can gain an understanding of your sailing/racing ability, mainly doing fleet racing. Finally at the end of the day there will be a debrief where you shall be told whether you have made it through to the Sunday of trials. The weekend is led by the Teams Captain and Teams Secretary who are in charge of all the runnings of dinghy racing during the year, as well as 3-4 outside judges who have the ability to select who makes what team and who sails with who, so that the decisions are completely unbiased – Team Captain/Secretaries are normally trialling for teams too!
Sunday will be the real test, where it will be more focused on deciding who you’ll sail with and which team you’ll be part of 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4ths, you will be doing a mix of drills as well as fleet racing and some team racing. Everything will be announced at the end of the day.
Reserves and 4th Team
Even if you don’t make teams you will be put onto the reserve list so that you’ll have the chance to compete in an event during the year in our 4th team (specially made for members who are still learning a lot about racing or can’t commit too much) as well as join us in any training, theory and fitness sessions so you’ll still be a key part of EUSC and teams. Reserves and 4th team members are as important as our other team members.
This year (2017/18) is the first year where we have managed to have enough people to make more of a committed 4th team who will be able race in almost every event we go to and look to progress/train throughout the year with us in order to try and get into a higher team the following year.