The coaching role in SailGP has changed considerably over the last five seasons. Originally coaches were based on the water in the team chase boat with limited data and no comms with the sailors during a race.
Now for Season 5 they are shore-based, working from a coaches’ booth where they have ready access to live data from their boat (and the rest of the fleet) and they are able to talk to their sailors at any point in a race.
Yacht Racing Life editor Justin Chisholm sat down with Emirates Great Britain SailGP Team coach Rob Wilson to get his take on the coaching role and how it has evolved over time.
Justin Chisholm: You have been coaching the British team since Ben Ainslie took it over in Season 2. What’s your take on the changes to the coaches’ role since then?
Rob Wilson: Two or three seasons ago–before we moved into the coaches’ booth–you could just about get away with one person in the coaching role. In fact, even in that first season when we moved onshore into the booth, we were only really giving a little bit of tactical information. I don’t think we had access to the data the sailors can see on the wing display on board the boat, so we didn’t really have the full tactical picture. The sailors had that data, plus a close-up view of the racecourse and so were in a much better position to make judgement calls for themselves. We were really just monitoring comparative performance and general wind trends.
Justin Chisholm: So what’s changed?
Rob Wilson: Now we have access to the SailGP umpiring software–through the UmpApp–so now we are definitely a backstop resource for avoiding collisions. That’s one reason why we started bringing more people into the booth. After we had an incident with Spain (see video below) where we had the booth as a backstop, but with just one person doing multiple tasks you couldn’t keep an eye on UmpApp all the time. Now with 12 boats you have to have someone constantly monitoring it. It gives us a safety net to help avoid collisions that could effectively end your season. A big crash means you maybe miss one or two events and then you get season points deducted too.
Justin Chisholm: Who do you have in the booth with you?
Rob Wilson: We have Nick Robins [a member of the British Athena Pathway Youth America’s Cup in 2024] and Ben Cornish [a helmsman and cyclor with the British Ineos Britannia challenge for the 37th America’s Cup]. They have enabled us to make a massive gain by spreading the important roles out between the three of us.
Justin Chisholm: How do you personally approach the role of coach for the British team?
Rob Wilson: I think one of the important aspects of being a team coach in any sport is to be able to identify the big picture of where the team direction should be. You always need to be aware of that, but then be able to–on a particular day, or in a certain set of circumstances–focus in on what it is that is going to make the biggest difference then and there.
I guess I am relatively technical so I will often default to that aspect of the job. But then there are other days and situations where I look at it and say the technicalities are not what is going to make the difference here. The priority might be racing skills, or communication, or something else. Then you just have to switch mode and get into that topic.
SailGP has incredibly talented sailors–across the fleet, not just in the GBR team–and so as a coach you are definitely not teaching them anything. It’s more about being an extra set of eyes, being able to give an extra perspective that is able to take a step back and see the wood from the trees, and help in that way.
Then there is the fundamental aspect of being a coach: being the one who organises formal briefings and debriefs; acting as the independent agent if there are disagreements so that these don’t get blown out of proportion; generally being responsible for finding the best solutions to issues/problems – whether that be boat handling, starting, straight-line speed, or whatever.
Justin Chisholm: It must be pretty daunting to be facing these world class sailors as a group during a debrief?
Rob Wilson: It could be, but I have been involved with this squad for so long now that it’s all pretty relaxed. There’s a certain amount of formality when we get into the briefing and debriefing scenario–otherwise I don’t think they would be effective. But as soon as they are over we are heading out for dinner and it’s more like relaxing with friends.
Justin Chisholm: Is it easier to coach a team that is doing well, as opposed to one that can’t get out of the middle of the pack?
Rob Wilson: I think the biggest thing is how the sailors respond to how they are performing. That’s the big thing for me. If you are working with a team that for whatever reason is not performing as well as it feels it should, then as long as everyone is on the same programme of working out how to get better, then that can be really rewarding because you can see some big jumps in the results.
But yes, generally if a team is doing well then the sailors get their confidence up and go from strength to strength and there is no second guessing going on. That’s something we have all seen with the Australians in SailGP.
Justin Chisholm: Talk us through your schedule on a typical race-day.
Rob Wilson: There’s quite a lot of preparation work in the morning, just making sure we have accurate weather forecasts and that they are matching up with our observations. Then, as a team, we will run through the headline points from the previous day’s debrief.
Now that we have a bit of a performance team supporting us we will check in on the analysis work they have done overnight to make sure we are all on the same page with all that. We try to condense that as much as possible, because with so much data available from all the boats, it’s easy to overload the sailors with too much input. So it’s about learning what is the useful info to impart. But there are times when there is specific info that we can use to make gains – so we will dig deeper into that.
That’s all the typical morning build up and then we will get into the main briefing. That is usually a couple of hours before racing / an hour before dock out, when we will again go through the headline points from the previous day, the meteorology info for the day ahead, and the key racing points for the day.
We will always listen in to the briefing given by chief umpire Craig Mitchell each race day where he goes through five or six rules scenarios from the previous day’s racing and explains why he made those calls. There might have been some 50:50 situations and he will explain exactly what the umpires were thinking in those. It’s super useful because it helps the sailors and coaches get an insight into why rules-related decisions go one way or another.
Throughout the morning I’ll be having one-on-one discussions as necessary before we all split, and the sailing team goes to the boat and the performance team goes to the booth.
Justin Chisholm: Do you miss going on the water?
Rob Wilson: I do for sure. The reason I went into coaching was to be there on the water. I definitely have to make sure I get my on-the-water fix by sailing–or mostly wing foiling–on my own.
To be honest, though, it doesn’t feel too bad in SailGP because the sessions on the water are so condensed and the setup in the coaches’ booth is so good with the video feeds and everything else, that you have a pretty good picture of what is going on. But yes, I do miss being out there with them, however without all the technology we have in the booth we can’t provide anything like the quality of feedback that you can from the booth.
Justin Chisholm: You have a huge amount of information available to you on your computer screens in the coaches’ booth: performance data from your boat and the other 11 rival F50s, the umpire app, and then live video feeds. It must have taken a lot of time to get used to all that?
Rob Wilson: I guess the route my career has taken [Wilson has also been involved in multiple British America’s Cup campaigns] means I was already comfortable with all the squiggly lines on the Grafana [the open-source visualisation and dashboarding software that seamlessly integrates with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that SailGP uses to gather live data from its fleet] pages is something I have worked with a lot previously – and it is actually pretty intuitive also.
Then there’s the UmpApp, which is a typical umpire tool that is pretty easy to understand too.
But the video side definitely took a bit of getting used too. It’s kind of like having your own editing suite where you are able to capture interesting video clips from various separate angles – all while you are trying to give race feedback, too.
It’s quite a lot of equipment to deal with. I think if you came straight from Olympic coaching where you are out on the coach boat every day it would be challenging for a while. But after a while–just like with a computer game–you get familiar with the controls and it all becomes a little bit automatic.
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Justin Chisholm: When it comes to speaking to the sailors during racing, how do you get the balance right between imparting valuable information and being intrusive and distracting.
Rob Wilson: That’s a really good point and I think it depends on knowing the team you are working with and understanding how much input those sailors are going to want.
You are mainly speaking to the driver, the wing trimmer, and the strategist. The flight controller is head down focused on flying the boat, and the two grinders are pretty heads down too.
The British team has a pretty strong afterguard [Dylan Fletcher helming, Iain Jensen trimming the wingsail, Hannah Mills as strategist] and we have been through quite a few communications loops where we have tried various things. The way we have it now is that if we believe they are aware of all the key information then we don’t add anything from the booth.
But sometimes, when there’s lots of manoeuvring–like on a busy first downwind run where they are having to watch out a lot for other boats–that’s when they may miss certain info. So we have a sort of crib sheet of information that we know they need to be across and in certain situations we will back them up by feeding something specific to them. We previously had a system where there was specific information that we would always give them from the booth. But quite quickly they started covering that information themselves anyway, and we quickly became redundant.
Justin Chisholm: Do you make an effort to control your tone of voice when you talk to the boat? A bit like the voices we hear speaking to the Formula 1 drivers on Drive to Survive that are always very unemotional?
Rob Wilson: Well yes. You definitely don’t want to be emotional either way, for sure. When you are coaching in any sport I think you generally try to be quite neutral when you are speaking to your athlete.
One thing in SailGP that is hard in that respect is that if the team has had a bad race, then when you are on the water, you can have a private heart-to-heart chat with the sailors. Whereas the sailors and coaches alike are aware that they could be being listened in on at that point, so it's harder to be able to do that.
Images © Justin Chisholm / Yacht Racing Life
Justin Chisholm: With so little training time available to the teams in SailGP–sometimes just one practice racing day on the eve of the first day of the regatta–how do you balance the need to try out new techniques or setups with the need for the crew to get dialled into race mode?
Rob Wilson: Yes, it’s quite a tough balance – but it is one that everyone has to deal with. It can be hard to choose what to focus on–not only on the Friday practice day but on the Saturday first day of racing. You might be thinking that if you make some changes to the way you tack then it will significantly improve them. But then there is the question of how much time you are willing to spend on that.
I think the trick is to have thought through any changes in as much detail as possible beforehand. So, if you are going to change something at a certain point in the tack, you need to think about exactly what you are changing and how much, but also what the knock-on effects of that change will be so that you can adapt to that too and get it all in one hit.
But then you also need to have a plan b, where if you are not confident with the new way of tacking, you can roll back to the previous method.
Justin Chisholm: Does the lack of training/development time limit the opportunity to make a performance breakthrough?
Rob Wilson: You could look at it that way. Or, on the flip side, there’s the fact that there are 12 different teams all trying things, and you have the data from all of them. Everyone has the chance to learn from everyone else’s data. If someone has knowingly or unknowingly stumbled on a performance gain then–as long as you are able to spot it–it’s yours to benefit from.
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