OK, let's get realistic.

Leaving the politics and money factors out of the equation for the sake of this discussion...

For the skipper and tactician positions: It is widely known that all of the teams strongly believe that it is wiser/easier/faster to take a good match racer and turn him into a cat sailor than the other way around. While there are very few good match racers (on any type of boat) in this age range, kids that have come up through the Opti/college route will try to make a strong case that they understand rules and tactics better that a typical cat sailor.

For the crew positions: These are (very) physical boats. For these positions, they need physical sailors first, smart/cat-experienced second. You could argue that they don't even need to be sailors in the first place.

There will be an application process, so I doubt they would put non-sailors on these teams. There will also need to be some practice, and we've had some discussion about what that might look like.

I would say that if we're lucky, we'd see a maximum of one experienced cat sailor per team.

Mike

EDIT: BTW, the Alter Cup has absoulely no relevance to this event or the Olympics, and likely never will.

For the record:

"3.1. The regatta format will be fleet racing."

Match racing skill may have even less bearing on the selection process than cat sailing experience.

The host city boat will be San Francisco's baby, a strictly homegrown affair. I have no idea who's coordinating it at this point, but the boat will be crewed by members or recent alumni of the Bay area's many youth sailing programs (some club-affiliated, others club-independent). I heard over the weekend--but can't say for sure that it's true--that even the stars of collegiate programs at Stanford, Berkeley, Cal Maritime, etc., will be passed over unless they themselves came up through the ranks of San Francisco's junior programs.

For everyone else in the country the ticket will be to get noticed by Oracle. Given the direction Oracle has taken the Cup, not to mention the long-standing involvement of many its team own members in small cat sailing, I think it's unfair to assume they're going to poo-poo cat sailors when it comes to picking their youth team. In fact, I don't think the whole blue-blazer-vs.-catsailor narrative even makes any sense to them. (If it did, our eyes would still be glazing over watching Version 5 boats drift around in prestarts.) They just want talent, and they'll be looking for winners. Whether they won on big boats or small boats, one hull or two hulls, singlehanded or as part of a big monoslug crew--who knows? But winners they will be.

That's encouraging, maybe "the boyz" will get a look.

Good point about the match racing, but I'm referring to the overall mentality. We will certainly push to see cat sailing in the application process, but Oracle is primarily driving the bus.

Mike

as we saw in Venice, tactics in a fleet race are certainly slow and clean air/boatspeed are king.

But I agree that the establishment will probably want to boast about their team sailors having an extensive resume on a number of different boats. Since most catsailors are anit-establishment in the first place, it may be hard to "fit" back in there to be noticed.

But here's the silver lining.... Most likely some of this technology will eventually trickle down to the "restofus" group wherein we could enjoy a somewhat scaled down version of this exciting platform

And, given that there seems to be a growing interest in multihull platforms for a number of different races, there could be a future opening up for those folk willing to put in the mileage...

Looks like SoCal is bringing it!

Youth Team!

BREAKING! American Youth Sailing Force in the house. The second American America's Cup youth team has announced their campaign!

American Youth Sailing Force!

Surf

Is there any more information on how San Fran and Oracle plan to select their teams? or even a time frame for selection.
These two groups are making some big assumptions that a team approach is worthwhile.

I don't know. It's a big mystery.

Here come the Aussies....