July 6, 2023
2 minutes reading time
“Sailing is not hard to teach if you make it easy to love”
Ten local coaches recently completed a week-long Technical Course for Coaches in Indonesia – the first course to be held in the country since 2012. Funded by the Olympic Solidarity program, the course aimed to teach instructors to safely introduce new sailors to the sport and further the Indonesian Sailing Federation’s goals of developing its national training program.
Held on the shores of the National Sailing Centre in Jakarta, the shallow waters allowed coaches to set and lay training marks for effective sessions, and a range of sailing conditions throughout the week brought the need to be flexible and design routines that mirrors the race environment. The calmer mornings provided ideal conditions for teaching beginners, with a light winds with small wavelets. Each afternoon the wind built and provided conditions more suited to advanced sailors.
Tim Cross was impressed with the levels of camaraderie and support for each other shown throughout the course.
He said, “The local support planning and coordination of logistical support was impressive for the course. Acknowledgement must be given to the host venue and volunteers and staff that made this happen. A highlight for the program was the sense of the community of practice that naturally developed between the participants throughout the course. It is hoped that the positivity shown by all the coaches who completed the course will benefit the future successes of the National Federations sailing programs.”
The course was organised by Wirontono Wardojo, Head of Performance at the Indonesian Sailing Federation, a 2022 World Sailing Training Scholarship candidate, and delivered by World Sailing-appointed Coach Developers Tim Cross from Great Britain and Mohamed Gamal of Egypt at the Indonesia National Sailing Centre.
Wirontono said, “The course ran very well and just as planned. The participants all benefited from the knowledge and skills to train sailors effectively. Sailing is not hard to teach if you make it easy to love. Participants learned many new things to make coaching innovative and super fun, and therefore simple and easy to understand.”
Delivering the course served two purposes for the federation. Firstly, to help coaches around the country improve the standards of coaching within sailing, and secondly as the impetus behind developing a National Training Centre that will host coaching courses for all levels.
“We are going to build a National Training System – something we have never had before – along with a suitable syllabus for every stage. We will develop our sport system to improve the capability of our staff and athlete performance to raise the profile of sailing in Indonesia and contribute to the growth of the sport across the region.”
To find out more about the range of Technical Courses for Coaches available, please visit the World Sailing website.