AN EVERGREEN INCUBATOR

In an era in which scholastic sports are all about medals and trophies, this high school sailing hive in the Pacific Northwest is putting its focus on community.

- DAVE POWLISON

IN 2015, it looked as if the Olympia High School Sailing Team was history. Its numbers had dwindled to three active team members, and if that wasn't enough, its longtime volunteer coach had recently passed away. Orion Bird, a sailor in the program of that era, recalls, "It really felt like the program was on the verge of dying." ¶ Enter Sarah Hanavan, recently out of collegiate sailing at Western Washington University. She had moved to Olympia, Washington, and started volunteering with the team in the spring of 2015. That coming summer, she had planned to travel. ¶ "Before I left, one of the three team members, Elena Gonick, a junior, invited me to coffee," Hanavan says. "She told me she had watched kids from other teams who, at the start, were just as good as her, get better. She was frustrated that she had not. And she knew largely why. She said, 'We've had this revolving door of coaches, and I am afraid you're going to leave, just like the other coaches. The fact that she expected I wouldn't be back for the fall season really pulled at my heartstrings." So, before Hanavan left, she got the parents of the three students involved. "I gave them sort of a road map-here's what you need to do to make the program more viable, because I wasn't interested in being a perpetual volunteer." ¶ From there, it went to a committee at the Olympia YC, which had been hosting and supporting the program. And then came a momentous decision. Rather than simply pulling the plug, the yacht club, which at the time was housing the program and managing it, followed Hanavan's advice and went highrisk, high-reward, shocking the program back to life by creating a full-time paid coaching position that they offered to her when she returned that fall.

To say the club made the right move would be a dramatic understatement. In only five years, the Olympia race team numbers, which include Opti sailors, Laser sailors and the high school team, skyrocketed to 70.