The Embry-Riddle Sailing Club
About Us
We are an entirely student run sailing club and sailing team at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. Our mission is to promote the sport of sailing amongst our piers and represent Embry-Riddle in the Intercollegiate Sailing Association. We pride ourselves on offering a low barrier of entry to sailing, offering free lessons and opening our team to all students, regardless of experience. We want to teach as many students as possible and create life long sailors. Approximately 80% of our club members are students who joined with zero sailing experience, some had never stepped foot on a boat before joining our club! Each semester we continue to grow our program and welcome new students to the club.
The Growth of our Club
Over the past year, our club has experienced an overwhelming interest in sailing. Starting with just eight members in Spring 2020, our sailing team now has 18 committed students. In our recreation club, we have another group of 20 students involved in our sailing lessons and recreation events. This is not just a short term boost in interest. From late August to present, our club has been operating at full capacity non-stop with the same consistent group of students at events each week. The growth of our club is exciting, but our club is experiencing growing pains. Currently, our fleet of FJs and 420s is not large enough to sustain any future growth of the club. We are currently operating at, or over maximum capacity of our fleet. We consistently run out of boats at team practices, and have had to limit the amount of students attending our lessons because we simply do not own enough boats in our fleet to accommodate more sailors. Our fleet of six FJs and two 420s can only accommodate 16 students, 20 if we push it. We only expect our club to continue to grow next semester and need to expand our program in order to accommodate more sailors.
How You Can Help
The next step for our club is to purchase an additional 12-18 boat fleet of FJs. Why 12-18 boats? Purchasing more boats will not only quell our growing pains for years to come, but it will also make Embry-Riddle eligible to host intercollegiate sailing events for the SAISA conference. This is an important step for our team and is only possible if we own 12-18 boats in like age and condition, something we currently do not have.
Over the next few months, our club needs to raise the funds to make this purchase possible. We are working with our University to make the appropriate funds available but our club will still need to raise at least half of the funds for this project ourselves. We will need to rely heavily on the sailing community to pull this off.
Embry-Riddle is a 501(C) 3 non-for-profit organization. All contributions to Embry-Riddle are tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowed by law.
