Sydney Boys High School Sailing Association

Sydney High School Sailing Association (SHSSA) is an incorporated school-affiliated sailing association that promotes yachting and sailing for students, alumni (Old Boys) and friends of Sydney Boys High School. The association organises and conducts sailing and racing activities, provides a vehicle for facility-use agreements on behalf of the school, and manages membership arrangements (the school pays fees for current students). Contact is via the school sailing MIC or the school phone number listed on the site.

The heartbeat of the program is fleet racing and match racing in Pacer dinghies, the two-person trainers in which High sailors learn to handle a boat with what the school describes as precision and speed. A fleet of ten Pacers — built up through fundraising and a grant from The High Club — means at least twenty boys can be on the water at once, and from 2013 that depth of equipment underwrote a dedicated match racing season, a format that sharpens boat handling and tactical thinking far faster than fleet racing alone. The emphasis is competitive: this program exists to race, not simply to introduce the sport, and beginners are brought along within a structure that aims at the First Grade team.

Saturday inter-school racing through the summer season is the weekly rhythm, contested against eastern suburbs private schools on Sydney Harbour, and the calendar climaxes with the regattas that close the season — the Sydney open schools event held at Rose Bay among them. A step-up pathway also exists through the busy Saturday-afternoon Laser racing program at Double Bay Sailing Club, which High sailors can access as their skills and ambitions grow beyond the school Pacers. Because racing requires Australian Sailing membership, the Association arranges eligibility for current students — with the school paying those fees — and for Old Boys and friends alike.

The Association's role for adults is equally practical. Old Boys and friends of High may sail on Sundays in boats the school provides, and are introduced to racing as members of the Association rather than left to find their own way into the sport. The body also acts as the school's vehicle for agreements with third parties — negotiating occupancy and facility arrangements with partner clubs — which is the unglamorous machinery that keeps a school program afloat on someone else's waterfront.

Administration runs through Sydney Boys High School at 556 Cleveland Street, Moore Park — inland, beside the stadiums and parklands of the city's sporting precinct. Everything on the water, however, happens on Sydney Harbour, and the program has always been a guest of the harbour's clubs. Woollahra Sailing Club on Rose Bay is the usual training and racing venue in recent years; before that, the program made its base at Double Bay Sailing Club, where it had established itself by 2011 under a negotiated medium-term occupancy agreement. Boats come from the school's own ten-boat Pacer fleet, stored and accessed through these partner arrangements.

Rose Bay is generous water for school sailing. It is one of the broadest open bays on the harbour, giving race officers room to set proper windward-leeward courses well clear of moored boats, and its position inside the main harbour means it picks up the true sea breeze without the confused chop of the more exposed reaches. Conditions recorded during the schools competition give a flavour: 12-knot south-south-westerly sea breezes on some afternoons, and on others a fresh nor'easter building to around 15 knots and swinging east as the afternoon matures — enough to test crews in Pacers without overwhelming them.

There is a quiet logic to the geography. Double Bay and Rose Bay sit on the harbour's eastern side, a straightforward trip from Moore Park by road, and they place the boys in the heart of Sydney's densest concentration of sailing clubs. The Saturday schools competition on Rose Bay puts High sailors on the same water as their rivals from Scots and Cranbrook, in full view of one of the great natural amphitheatres of Australian dinghy racing. Few school sports programs anywhere get to train and compete in a venue of that calibre, and the Association's arrangements with the partner clubs are what make it possible season after season.

The Association's own founding year is not recorded in the public record; what is clear is that by 2011 the sailing program had, in the school's words, established itself at Double Bay Sailing Club, with the Association negotiating a medium-term occupancy agreement there. The school counts the body among its key partner organisations, in company with the P&C, the Foundation, the Old Boys Union and others — formal standing for what had become a permanent fixture of school life.

The parent school provides the deeper roots. Sydney Boys High School, founded in 1883, was the first government high school in New South Wales; it has belonged to the Athletic Association of the Great Public Schools since 1906 and was among the founding members of the CHS Sports Association in 1913. Sailing arrived much later and never joined the GPS roster, but it carved out its own niche.

Through the early 2010s the program professionalised steadily: fundraising and a High Club grant delivered two new Pacers in 2013, lifting the fleet to ten boats and enabling a new match racing season that same year. Leadership passed through a succession of committed figures — Mrs Collignon as MIC Sailing to 2011, then Mr Moody; long-serving coach and Old Boy Adam South; the Sailing Committee chaired by Richard James until 2013; and more recently coaches Hugo Leeming and Sam Steinberg, Sailing Captain Zhitian Mai in 2023 and current Sailing MIC Mr M Cotton.

The competitive high point of the modern era came in 2022, when the First Grade team finished fifth in a 24-team field at the NSW State Championships — the school's best recent season — and and with it qualification for the Australian Secondary Schools Teams Racing Championships, held at Georges River Sailing Club. For a program staffed by volunteers, coached by Old Boys and hosted entirely on borrowed waterfronts, it was a result that spoke to decades of quiet institutional building: a sailing association that has made itself, in the school's own framing, an essential partner in the life of one of Australia's oldest public schools.