For as long as Sailing World has been doing college rankings-they go back to at least 1979, when Ken Legler did them on his own-we’ve been using a select panel of top coaches to do the honors.
There were a number of reasons for using this system, including the general lack of sailing programs with college coaches in the late 1970s and the prohibitive logistics involved with using a larger panel or opening it up to every college coach.
But, times have changed, and Sailing World‘s college rankings, presented by Gill and Sailors for the Sea, are now determined by an open coaches poll. We give one vote to every team in the country with a coach, and publish our rankings bi-weekly. To register to vote in the poll, coaches need only send an email with their name, school, and number of years coaching college sailing to collegerankings@sailingworld.com.
Using an Internet polling site, every accredited coach can submit his or her list of the top 20 coed and 15 women’s team in the country. Each place is worth a certain number of points (20 points for first in the coed rankings, 19 for second, on down to 1 for 20th; 15 points for first in the women’s rankings, 14 for second, on down to 1 for 15th). All the points are tallied and the teams are ranked according to their respective point totals. Any team that receives at least two votes is listed as also receiving votes. The number of first-place votes a team receives is in brackets.
If you have any questions or comments, please send them to collegerankings@sailingworld.com.
