5 expert tips: How to make the best of crew dynamics

From big boats to Extreme 40s, David ‘Freddie’ Carr has been a lynchpin of close-knit and super-successful crews. He shares tips on team dynamics with Andy Rice

During the build-up to the 2024 America’s Cup, inside the INEOS Britannia team we came up with a set of team values that we ran our daily lives by,” says Freddie Carr. “Whether you’re competing in the America’s Cup or the Hamble Winter Series, I think there’s a set of core values that can really help bring crews together.”

If you’ve been sailing together for a while those values can develop organically. But if you’re still only getting to know each other, it’s helpful to define those values early on in the campaign.

“It’s good to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the team and tell each other that everything you discuss, however difficult or painful, is ultimately about making the boat go faster,” he says.

Freddie believes the British team’s rate of improvement throughout AC37 was in part due to the team’s buy-in to a set of values that they’d defined about six months before the competition began in Barcelona.

“We had our sailing team mantras pinned inside our lockers, reminding us every day how we were going to work as a team. I thoroughly recommend it, whatever level you’re at.”

Here are Freddie’s five best tips for creating a bomb-proof team dynamic born out of strong shared values.

Feedback and honesty

It’s good to have your team values written down and commonly shared and understood, particularly when you’re about to go into a tricky debrief or conversation where somebody might need to be critical of somebody else. One of our values is that feedback is for the greater goal, which is to make the boat go faster. That gets everyone into a place where constructive feedback and honesty is much easier to share.

We were also encouraged to speak up and to ‘swim against the tide’. When you’re in a meeting with a lot of strong individuals, it’s easy for someone to lead the conversation, after which it can get harder and harder for someone to take the opposite point of view. So we actively encouraged people to throw in an alternative viewpoint, and we called that ‘swimming against the tide’. It’s really useful for avoiding a team lapsing into ‘group think’.

Learn faster

In Barcelona our main goal was to learn faster than the opposition and we felt we did that all summer. Which is why we went from being maybe fourth or fifth out of the challengers in the Preliminary Regatta to ultimately winning the Louis Vuitton Cup and fighting through to the Match itself.

We achieved that because we did such a good job of learning faster, and the reason for that is because of our openness to feedback. Everybody, from Ben [Ainslie] down to the cyclors who were learning to sail, could sit in a room and debrief with complete honesty. Nobody took offence or tried to defend a position.

Achieving that level of honesty is never easy, and it’s probably harder at non-professional levels in the sport. But if you can instil a culture of learning faster than everyone else, and being committed to always asking ‘What can we do to make the boat go faster?’ the results are bound to follow.

Debriefing without rank

We were very fortunate to have a special relationship with a group from the British military during my time with the British America’s Cup challenge. One of the best lessons I took away from them is the way they debrief their missions.

They’re dealing with real life-and-death situations, and one of their mantras is that they always debrief a mission without rank. So we did the same, which meant that everyone – from Ben down to the rookie doing their first Cup – was heard in equal measure. All opinions were considered equally. In fact, we even went further in that we wouldn’t let the big characters speak first but would encourage other people on the team to kick off the conversation.

Rob Wilson and the coaching team did a great job of creating an environment where they’d throw open the floor to the whole group. It really makes you think about what you’re going to say, because you’re asking yourself ‘What if they come to me first?’. So it gets everyone to engage with the process.

Switch on ‘record’

I’ve been used to operating in an environment where pretty much everything we do is being recorded on video from multiple angles, and our voices are being recorded too.

But what I’ve noticed since coming back into the wider sport over the past year is how much the use of video and audio recording has filtered down to other levels like the TP52s.

Now the helmsmen, the tacticians, the navigators are all mic’ed up, and everything is recorded because you live and die by your communication.

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It’s such a good step forward within the sport because there’s no hearsay, no ‘I said left turn and you went right’ kind of disagreements. It’s all factual and it means you can have an honest debrief.

On training days with the TP52 Gladiator our coach, Antonio, has a live mic playing into earphones, and he can listen to the live conversation of the team as we go around the course. It enables him to home in on the bits of the session where maybe the afterguard had a bit of a barney about something, and he can focus on that area of disagreement. But equally when we’re really locked in to a good period of speed upwind, he can highlight that too.

Recording your training and racing sessions is a really useful addition to the toolbox and I’d recommend trying it.

‘Check the ropes’

We had a phrase in the last Cup which was ‘checking the ropes’. And it was our way of checking in on each other, to keep an eye and ear out for mental health and supporting your teammates.

It’s about remembering that these people – your teammates – are going through exactly the same thing that you are. It’s about remembering that some of us might have wives or partners that are getting a bit grumpy at home because you’ve worked seven days straight and you haven’t seen the kids, or they might have a grandparent that’s ill at home. Everybody’s got these real-life stressors but it’s too easy to walk into a team environment and put the shield up and try to be a superhero. It’s good to check in with your teammates and make sure that their daughter’s first day at nursery went well.

You don’t have to be friends with everyone, but just be kind to them and take an interest in their lives and what they’re going through. That really keeps team politics bullshit at bay.

And it also means that further down the line, when you have to have tough conversations with your teammates about something from the racing, it makes it a whole lot easier if you’ve already built a good relationship.

For heat-of-the-moment situations where it’s all turning to custard, maybe you’ve had a badly executed kite drop and lost a couple of boats at the leeward mark, using a trigger word can be really helpful. It might be as simple as ‘reset’ – as in ‘Okay, lads, let’s reset,’ – to get everyone back into the present and focusing on the next thing. It’s also about keeping an eye out for how each of us is responding to stress.

In the last Cup we had a buddy system where we were paired off with a teammate, and my buddy was Ben Cornish. If I was getting a little bit nervous I had a habit of marching around the foredeck and, hard though it might be to believe, I would actually talk more than usual. My buddy might say to me, ‘“You alright today? You’re wearing a hole out in the foredeck with all that marching up and down. Is everything good?” So Cornish acknowledged that I was nervous or uptight that day and we’d then have a little chat about it.

Once you get that anxiety or anger out of your head and into the open, it starts to disappear pretty quickly. Having an outlet for your feelings is really healthy and it’s the sign of a great team when you can look out for each other like that.

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