NorthStar's Joe Glanfield on Coaching in SailGP's High-Speed Arena

At the beginning of 2025, SailGP moved the 12 team coaches off the water and into a Formula 1-style booth overlooking the racecourse. With access to a lot more live data than previously and with a crystal-clear comms link to speak directly to the boat the coaches have effectively become the teams’ seventh crew member.

In a previous story I quizzed Emirates Great Britain SailGP Team coach Rob Wilson to get his insight into the changes to the coaching role in SailGP. This time it is the turn of the Canadian North Star SailGP Team’s British coach, Joe Glanfield.

Crewing for Nick Rogers, Glanfield won silver medals in the 470 class in the Athens and Beijing Olympic Games, before moving into coaching where he helped British 470 pair Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark to a silver medal at London 2012. He is a SailGP veteran having previously coached early iterations of the US and Canadian squads.

Ask any of the 12 SailGP coaches and they will each likely give you a different opinion on what their role is with their team. For Glanfield it comes down to ‘two simple things’.

“In my mind, if you really boil it down, the purpose of the coach in any team is firstly to develop the team, and then secondly to help the team perform to its highest level. Sometimes those two things can work a little bit in conflict with each other, in that sometimes you are actually just trying to worry about today's performance, and other times you're trying to develop things that you know might not help you today, but they'll help you in the future.

As an example of the latter scenario, Glanfield cites the need to develop the crew’s tacking technique – not easy given the severely restricted practice time the teams have outside of the racing itself.

“You might have a way of tacking that you know is quite reliable, but you also know it's not optimum and there are teams that do it better. So the choice is, do you do what's reliable, but means you are maybe fourth best in the fleet, or do you push to perfect the optimum technique, knowing that it might mean that you have a worse performance on that specific day while you try to get it right.

“Achieving the right balance between performance management and development is a tricky tightrope to tread. You can end up a bit stuck just always trying to perform, because there are so few opportunities to develop. You can use all the data, the videos, the discussion points from the debriefs, to try to drive development. But then you have to go on the water and try to perform in the racing.”

Glanfield told me that coaching in SailGP is unlike any other discipline of the sport.

“Particularly, it’s different to the Olympic coaching that I am very familiar with. First off it’s a much bigger team. We have much more data – both about us and our opponents, which is very unique – but then we also have much less training time. It’s an environment that creates quite different demands than any other type of sailboat racing.

On a worldwide circuit like SailGP, gaps between events last several weeks. Once the team arrives at an event one of Glanfield’s key priorities is get the team dialed in to the local conditions focused on which configuration of the F50 catamaran’s wing sail and underwater appendages have been selected by race management.

“Once you have got a good idea of the forecast and you know what configuration of boards and wings and rudders you need to start looking at what our performance was like when we last used this configuration in these sailing conditions. What were the key points that we're working on and what did we decide was important to get a good result?”

On the morning of the first race Glanfield uses his briefing to try to zero in on those key points, prior to the sailors going afloat.

“We try to identify what are the key things we're working on and what we are trying to deliver. We normally have about 45 minutes of sailing time before the first race, so it’s important to agree on how we are going to use that time in order to be best prepared for the first race.

“Normally it's a combination of looking at past notes and experiences, stuff that we have jotted down, and then creating a shape for the briefing that's right for that day. I think the critical part in any sailing briefing is to get the sailors talking. It's not about the coach standing up and telling the sailors ‘this is how you need to sail today’. The role of the coach is to facilitate a conversation and get them thinking about where their focus needs to be. To be asking themselves what the opportunities and the challenges are for that day.”

In other sailing disciplines, once the sailors are out on the racecourse there is nothing further the coach can do to influence their performance. Not so in SailGP however. When the Canadian sailors leave the dock Glanfield heads for the coaching booth where he rendezvous with other members of the NorthStar performance team.

Once plugged into the SailGP ‘matrix’ they have at their fingertips access to a dizzying array of data about their own boat and the other 11 teams, video feeds from onboard their boat and from the TV broadcast helicopters, plus access to the crew’s onboard tactical software. Besides all that, the coaches can also access the screens used by the SailGP umpiring teams – which displays the live speed and angle of all the boats on the water. No surprise then that the Canadians – like most of the top teams – have invested in extra personnel in the coaches’ booth.

“I have about eight different windows on my screen,” Glanfield tells me. “But I tend to only look at four of them – otherwise I think it would fry my brain. Most teams have two people in the booth now: one that looks more at the data side of things and can give feedback on that, and then someone in my kind of role who is much more immersed in the actual race and contributing to the decision making. That’s the big difference with SailGP, once they are out on the water you are still very much involved.”

The coaches cannot select a specific sailor to speak to so anything they say can be heard in the headsets of everyone on the boat. Choosing how much to say and about what is a challenge Glanfield believes all the coaches are facing.

“I'm sure that if you interviewed all 12 coaches there would be differences in what their assigned roles are around what they communicate to their sailors. I think the important thing is that there is some consistency in what you are communicating. I'm always wary of saying too much. I feel like it would be easy to do more harm than good. Worse still, to take away the ownership from the sailors. For me, the fundamental trait of all the great sailors I've coached, the thing that's similar in all of them is that autonomy of thought – that they are able to think for themselves and make decisions for themselves. I think it would be an error if because the coach is able to talk to them during the race, they end up in a situation where they were following instructions.

Accordingly, Glanfield says he largely keeps his input to the boat brief and as factual as he possibly can.

“I focus on stuff either to do with other boats, or bias on the gates, the number of tacks or gybes. Occasionally I might pose a question if I have heard them talk about something, right? I would say I probably speak once every couple of minutes. But it's short and I'm trying to make it shorter by using as few words as possible. Sometimes, though, it's hard to express what you mean when you are trying to use as few words as possible.”

Like the calm tones of the F1 race engineers we have all become used to talking to their drivers on Drive to Survive, Glanfield says he tries to sound as unemotional as he can when speaking to the boat.

“I worry that I might sound uninterested, but I'm definitely trying to sound as level and logical as possible.”

Like British coach Rob Wilson in his interview, Glanfield told me he enjoys the new onshore coaching setup, given its advantages over coaching from a stationary coach boat, but acknowledges that he misses being able to speak face to face with the sailors between races.

“When we were on the chase boats there came a point where we were allowed to talk to them during the race. But the comms channel wasn't clear enough from the chase boat to the yacht to make it viable. Now it's really clear from the booth to the yacht and you can see more than from the chase boat where you are stuck at one end of the course. So, in many respects, you do feel like you're more useful in the booth.

“I guess the bit that's changed is that when you're on the chase boat, where if they just had a good race, or a tough race, you could jump on the boat with them and you have that human connection. I put a high value on getting to know my sailors well, understanding how they're feeling, and knowing what they need to hear. Obviously you can take a pretty good guess at that from the booth, but it's not the same as being next to someone and knowing what they could do with talking about or hearing. So from that point of view you are a little bit more disconnected.