Writing Sailing Books to Win

by Rob Kothe on 27 Jul 2015 Jon Emmett, a top level British Laser sailor from the mid 90’s, campaigned for Olympic selection until he suffered a long term injury, but since then he has made his mark as a high-performance coach and author.

Emmett became an RYA instructor in 1996, began International coaching in 2000, and became the UK Laser Association training officer in 2006. He coached the 2006 Laser Radial World Champion Lijia Xu (Lily) who was the 2008 Olympic Bronze medallist, to Olympic Gold in Weymouth 2012 and he continues to coach at the highest level

Sailing against his pupils as a sailing partner, he has retained his own on water skills.

In 2013, he won the UK National Championships and the Apprentice Masters World Championships, and successfully defended both titles in 2014.

Jon Emmett’s first book ‘Be Your Own Sailing Coach’ published in 2008 now reprinted as Coach Yourself to Win, part of the Sail to Win series is already a performance dinghy sailing classic.

His second book ‘Be Your Own Tactics Coach’ launched in 2011 has been equally successful.

The long-time dinghy sailing coach has seen his second book now launched in German as Der Taktik Coach, and his first book is about to be published in Chinese and Japanese.

Emmett is a natural communicator. While he is now coaching at the highest level, thanks to his club coaching experience he is able to distil the elements of complex subjects down into their essentials and then break them into steps. His books are very much practical manuals.

Emmett’s books use a lot of diagrams and some amusing nomenclature, for two very practical reasons as the Weymouth based sailing coach explains:

‘The first one is that there's an awful lot of people out there who would love to have professional coaching and somebody there to support them all the time. But for whatever reasons, they can't get access to that. So they need to have clear goals and a professional approach. So I wanted to help those people who didn't have access to coaching. It was also just an opportunity to write down all the things that I found myself saying day in, day out.

‘ I think that the second thing is the style of book is very much influenced by the fact that I've done a lot of work with people whose first language isn't English, so I’ve tried to put everything in as clear a way as possible.

‘Because it’s not what you say as a coach, it's what people understand and what people remember. So I think that was why it was written in that style.

Over the years I have done a lot of coaching with foreign internationals including German, Spanish, Dutch, Swedes, Swiss, Chinese, Turks and Israelis. (He is currently coaching Israel’s Oren Jacob as she strives to take her country’s first ever Laser Radial Olympic qualification.)

With an assortment of languages, I’ve learned how to communicate concepts with diagrams. In these and the accompanying text I give names to the sailors , for example, Rebecca Room and Sophie Starboard - It used to be a bit of fun when I was coaching the young kids, because you'd try not to particularly single people out.

‘But regardless of language this way of remembering things, works very well. I say that it's not what you say, it's what people remember that actually counts.

‘The style works, there's quite a lot of research which has shown that when you tie people to events or things like that, people are much more likely to recall it.

‘Sailing books are mostly in English because most of the best sailors have pretty good English – But that is not the case in China and Japan, the hope is to bring it there.

‘And obviously because I've spent so much time working with them, with the Chinese, I do really want to help those sailors. Because they don't have the coaching knowledge (and depth) out there, they don't have the history that we did in the UK - where we turn sailors into coaches as we get older and so on.

‘What I have explained in both books is essential material.

‘It does not matter what standard you are at, Lily was a World Champion and an Olympic medallist when I started working with her but we went through all the basic stuff, because the basic stuff absolutely counts at every level.’

Emmett clearly enjoys the communication process at every level. He is regularly providing additional content on both his Facebook pages. page and Facebook group plus his YouTube Channel.

The final word, the same as the start – Emmett’s two books are both ‘must reads for dinghy sailors, get them now.