The Weir & Sons Leinster Match Racing Open, to be hosted by the Royal Irish Yacht Club on June 12th and 13th, looks like it will see a real influx of talent from the college team racing scene. Rick Morris caught up with Marty O’Leary.
IUSA Student Match Racing Champ, captain of the dominant DIT team on the student team racing circuit, on the winning team at the ITRAs and quarters at UKTRA and the Wilson. That’s some year already before the rest of us have got the boat in the water. I know you’re a pretty laid back guy but you must be pretty happy?
Ah yeah, fairly happy alright, I have been very lucky with the standard of sailors that I have been able to race with, both with DIT and the George team. The IUSA circuit is also brilliant craic, doesn’t matter if your winning or losing, there is 200 - 250 students competing in each event, with them kind of figure you cant go wrong.
The Royal St. George has great ties with West Kirby Sailing club too, which has helped us greatly, as we have been able to train and compete in both the Wilson and the UKTRA's which were held in West Kirby.
DITs support towards sailing has also been great awarding 4 or 5 sports scholarships last year alone to the Sailing club and lots of funding and support on top of this too.
We’re pretty keen to have people coming out of team racing and into match racing in their early to mid 20s. Aiden McLaverty did the Dublin Open and should stay on Tour and now you are having a crack at the World University Match Racing Champs and entering the Match Racing Tour for the Leinster Open. How can we help make the link between the two disciplines seamless?
Yeah its good to see Students entering it as helms, a lot of the crews are made up of students who regularly team race. DIT are sending us over to compete in the Word University match Racing Champs in Crete in July, so it would be mad not to go. The Leinsters will be used to get some training in and learn as much as we can.
As it is now, you have John Sheehy, Nick Smith, Andrew Fowler, Conal Cassey, Graham Elms and a few others all on the Tour regularly; these have all done a lot of team racing. The problem isn’t to do with ability. Maybe some lower grade events should be run, grade four or five that teams can progress together just like the above teams did last year. It can be very hard to enter the Tour when everyone is that much further ahead of you already.
That looks to be something the clubs with access to the J80s are starting to do. Lough Derg has the Portroe Cup, the Irish are talking about a similar event and there will be an evening of match racing at Howth later this month. May be you’ll see some space open up on the Tour as the better teams move on to do more grade 3 events here and abroad too. Cost is the other thing we need to keep working on. It sounds like things are getting interesting with the development of team racing too. Munster has a really strong thing going on through the schools. Tell us what’s going on at the George?
There is alot of team racing going on during the summer in the George, Tuesday night leagues where you just arrive with ur crew and are assigned a team for the night should be up and running again last year after having around 20 full crews each week last year.
Oppies are doing some 4 boat team racing too most likely on Wednesdays coached by myself and a few of the other older team racers. We also ran a 2 week team racing course last year in that was a uge success so maybe that will be repeated again.
And we hope the get the George Invitational back up and running, this was the Irish Version of the Wilson Trophy, maybe not as big as the Wilson is now, but same idea, with many teams coming overseas to compete in it, so hopefully we will get that up and running again.
