Wayzata Sailing School

The Wayzata Sailing School

WYC and Wayzata Sailing Foundation launch new community sailing school

The Wayzata Yacht Club and the Wayzata Sailing Foundation are excited to announce the creation of a new community youth sailing program based at the Wayzata Yacht Club location on East County Rd 16 in Wayzata. The Wayzata Sailing School will provide sailing instruction to youth from age 8 through college. Our goals are to provide accessible and affordable sailing for all area kids and promote the lifetime sport of sailing. We will also provide instruction and coaching in the sport of sailboat racing.

This new program is part of the Wayzata Yacht Club's commitment to the community and the sport of sailing. The Boards of both the yacht club and sailing foundation hope you will join in supporting the WSF and the new Wayzata Sailing School to make this endeavor a spectacular success.

Plans for the new sailing school were developed over the winter, led by Pat Maloney, the President of the Wayzata Sailing Foundation and Past Commodore of the WYC. The WSF hired Executive Director and Head Coach Cappy Capper to run the school with the help of Racing Coach Brent Ostbye. The spring session for high school racing is just weeks away. Registrations are well underway for the summer racing sessions and day camps.

The school is an ongoing project for WSF and Pat is looking for help and support of all kinds. Please contact him to find out how you can support the Wayzata Sailing School as a donor, volunteer or parent of a prospective student sailor.

For those of you interested in the history leading up to this decision, some history and context follows.

For many years, our club provided youth, high-school and collegiate sailing programs at WYC in partnership with the Lake Minnetonka Sailing School (LMSS).

Especially over the past decade, the LMSS has done an tremendous job in supporting the mission of the WYC to promote the sport of sailing and encouraging youth to race sailboats. We have seen this particularly in the growth of high-school and collegiate racing in the 420 class as well as Lasers and, for the youngest sailors, Optimists. A number of the alumni of LMSS in these classes are now crew or family members of the WYC.

The Minnetonka Yacht Club was founded in 1882 and is one of the oldest yacht clubs in America. The MYC has a wonderful tradition of generation after generation of families growing up, racing scows together, traveling to regattas to be guests at other ILYA family’s homes and hosting other families in their homes for MYC regattas. In the ILYA it is not unusual to see grandparents, parents and children all competing together in a regatta in the various scow classes.

In the past year or so important constituencies at MYC have asked the LMSS board to make some changes to place greater emphasis on racing and to develop a more intensive advanced racing program called Advanced Youth Racing, for Optimists, X-Boats, and Lasers.

We believe this new emphasis is very important to the long-term health of the MYC and the sport of sailing on Lake Minnetonka, at least in part by creating the next generation of scow sailors and perpetuating the winning tradition of MYC. These changes also provide an opportunity to create a distinct identity between the MYC-based program, which will continue to be operated by the LMSS, and the WYC-based program, which will be operated by the WSS.

In past years the sailing school programs have filled up within a few weeks of opening enrollment. Clearly, there is much more demand for sailing school programs on Lake Minnetonka than there has been capacity to meet the demand. We believe that by offering two “flavors” of sailing school programs to the community, and by working cooperatively with the LMSS, we can all better serve the sport, the community and our respective clubs.

For more information on the Wayzata Sailing School, click this link.