En route, a booster mom asked, “Do I know any of your children? Are they in soccer, baseball, track? I must know them if they are in any of the summer programs.”

“Actually, you probably don’t know them. My kids are sailors,” I responded, and thought to myself: “We all are.”

“How wonderful that they’re learning a lifelong activity!”, she exclaimed. I was stunned. There it was again: a non-sailing parent, a kids-sports cheerleader extraordinaire, seeing clear to one of the Grand Benefits of sailing (and one of the key themes of the book.)

I wrote the book Saving Sailing in part because I hoped to find out more about the make-up of the important people with whom we are associated when we are kids, like coaches, teachers, and boosters. And I expected that one of the outcomes of the book would be that people who have taught or teach sailing would share their own experiences and perspectives. That is happening in every speaking venue, review and blog where the book is being discussed and it is a good thing. I am especially excited to see many terrific ideas being shared and many mistakes being averted because they’ve been made already, and needn’t be made again.

But candidly, the book also tackles the fundamental weaknesses in the kids-sports paradigm.

Here’s one: Let’s call it the “make it fun” fixation. We’re reading and hearing over and over that to get kids to commit to a program it has to be fun.

Of course it has to be fun.

But are we trying to get our kids to agree to subscribe to a program, or are we looking to help our kids understand something about life, or the natural world, or the meeting of science and technology, or the behaviors (good and bad) of the people that they will meet?

These are the things that sailors know that sailing can do, when sailing is seen as something more than a kids-sport.

The other major theme appearing in book-inspired blogs is that learning to sail is much more than just fun. If asked, almost every experienced sailor will tell you that they sail for bigger reasons than instant gratification; they might be there to reminisce, or to be challenged over years, or to escape, or to find something missing in their life.

The non-sailing booster mom has it right: sailing can be lifelong. It’s more than a kids-sport. So taking her lead, some possible goals of a sailing program could be to connect to tradition, or to present challenge, or to help build the confidence to tackle on-shore troubles, or even to help someone find meaning in their life.

The way to do this is by measuring on dimensions of substance. I work with a sailing center that is setting metrics with a much longer time horizon, like rate of return in advanced training, rate of graduation to teaching and rate of multigenerational involvement.

Should fun be the underlying goal of a sailing program? No. Fun isn’t a goal, it is an outcome.

- ndh (nickhayes@savingsailing.com)