Every youth sport – soccer, baseball, you name it – has sign-ups for a local league that offers organized games, but the pursuit of excellence has fostered travel teams with heightened coaching and competition. Sailing has this too, and while the risk of burnout and added expense exists at this level, Kimball Livingston shares a view of the landscape for Sailing World:

Quick—name two words that have never been paired in previous generations of youth sailing.

Private team.

Anyone with an eye on the game in America—no one else does youth racing the way we do it—knows the phrase. Private teams are a 21st-century phenomenon. Then there are the hybrids. Then there are the tribes of coaches who band together in common cause, and all of them together are woven into the game in multiple hotspots of traditional dinghy racing.

It’s not the old landscape. This is a sampling of the new. – Full report