Windsurf recertification at TWC

DRAFT

Sail Canada / Ontario Sailing require that windurfing instructors recertify every 3 years. I felt that was perhaps a bit too often but I was looking forward to getting back down to Toronto Windsurfing Club. I have great memories of the club and racing Wednesday nights in the years when we lived in Toronto. Windsurfing with the CN tower and Toronto skyline on the horizon is always spectacular!

TWC runs excellent “Learn to windsurf” youth programs and between Max and WeCanFoil it is becoming a hub for teaching foiling. It has a great vibe. Over the day, I bumped into a bunch of good friends.

My excellent instructor from my last recertification, David Zeni, sent out the Google Classroom materials ready for our session. On Sunday, the two others doing the recertification (like me) joined the 6 first time coaching students who had already had full Friday evening and Saturday sessions.

Our Sunday morning session was performing all the land lessons that we had been assigned in the classroom. My session was on knots - I called it “Tying up loose ends”. In the afternoon, we were on the water. I had brought my Kona and my 5.4m Duke sail. That was the perfect rig for the super gusty north wind which I recalled is always a challenging direction in Toronto's outer harbour.

My instruction session was upwind sail coaching and the fellow course candidates all did great! We went through a bunch of other drills. My favourite was a follow the leader where the coach boat driver motored around the bay with us as ducklings, all trying to stay as close as possible. Later, I worked on some duck tacks during the tacking session (made around 50%) and upwind 360s during the stop / start session (made almost all of those!).

There were lots of smiles on the water. And even more as we got off to do our debrief feedback for our coaching sessions.

At the conclusion of the session, I enjoyed telling the group that we are lucky to be coaching during such a renaissance time for windsurfing. New, lighter gear that makes windsurfing a gateway to foiling, BBtalking headsets, iRIGs, passionate instructors like David and Sean and Sail Canada / Ontario Sailing are all making windsurfing great again.

I will provide some feedback about the course material and focus of the “Windsurfing Instructor” course. It seems to be overly focused on lesson pedagogy exclusively oriented for youth yacht club camps. There is nothing focussed on one-on-one teaching which would be much more applicable for myself, and others of my classmates, as well. There were 3 of us doing the recertification on Sunday. Instead of hearing a lecture about what to wear or how to find the wind, I (and I'm suspecting the other candidates) would have loved to have heard from Ethan and Kyler about their real world successes and challenges teaching windsurfing over the last 3 years.

While I enjoyed teaching the assigned knot lesson, in my multi year career as a windsurf instructor, I have never once had need or opportunity to give a 20 minute lesson to a group, focussed only on knots. If Sail Canada / Ontario Sailing want to significantly increase windsurfing in general, and use it as a pathway into sailing and foiling - there needs to be a broadening of windsurfing course content. It should include the new global standards of beginner teaching (eg. course materials should be showing hand on the mast continuously for the entire first lesson, only 2 fingers on the boom for beginners - the "back hand grabs the boom" in the manual is a recipe for frustration.) More time on building / maintaining good land simulators should be included. I was surprised that when I was out coaching on the water Sunday afternoon that students hadn't learned the extremely valuable "tennis save" to keep balance when uphauling.

There should also be a focus in the curriculum on ensuring that students receive a photo of themselves on the water - so they have a memory of their session and so that we can grow the sport on social media. And there doesn't need to be any course material about sailboat only technology, terms and theory.

It would be great for a portion of the course to be on how to complete student evaluations. I doubt many of the course participants know about, or will be using, the helpful Sail Canada sailcanada.checklick.com software which is a shame, as students just love getting certificates.

I’m really glad I got to be part of the course again and already look forward to sharing my excitement about windsurfing with more students in the future. Thank you to David and Sean and all the course participants.

Here are some fun photos of the day.