From Nine Boats to Twenty-Four: A Beer-Can Series Playbook

The case study worth copying

In 2019, D. B. Tanner wrote up how Dillon Yacht Club — on a high-altitude reservoir in Colorado, not exactly a sailing metropolis — built a beer-can series from scratch. The numbers he reported are the most useful thing published about club racing growth in the last decade, because they're specific:

The fleet ran from a Schock 40 rating PHRF −6 down through J/Boats, Catalinas and Islander Bahamas cruisers. And the entire rulebook was four lines: stay on the boat, no protests, carry a radio, be nice to each other.

Tanner's own explanation of why it worked is the thesis of everything below: the more someone must give in time and money, the fewer people will be willing to give it. Growth didn't come from adding a promotion. It came from subtracting requirements.

1. Fix the format before you fix the marketing

"Rigid, time-intensive formats that don't fit modern lifestyles" is the single most consistent finding in the sport's own research — Australian Sailing named it first among the six core problems in its 2025 National Participation Review, and that's in a country where participation is growing.

A weeknight series is the natural answer because it has a hard stop built in: the sun. The Chicago Beer Can Series, one of the largest weeknight programs in North America, publishes exactly what that discipline looks like — a 2.5-mile-diameter racing circle, courses of 3.5 to 5.5 miles, starts between 6:40 and 7:10pm, most boats finished by 8:30.

That's the whole design brief. Someone should be able to leave work, race, and be home at a reasonable hour without having surrendered the evening. If your Wednesday night regularly runs past dark, you don't have a promotion problem.

Write a one-page notice, not a notice of race

Race officer John Palizza's guidance is that the Notice of Race and Sailing Instructions "form the blueprint of what the race committee has to do" — check-in, sequences, class flags, courses, marks, lines, time limits, scoring. That's correct for a championship. For a beer-can series it's a barrier disguised as diligence. Dillon's four lines covered it. Yours can fit on a single page, and should.

2. Make the first season free

Look at what a sailor typically has to clear before their first club race: join the club, get a PHRF certificate, pay a race committee fee, pay a series entry, and read a twelve-page document. Five gates, each individually reasonable, collectively fatal. Every prerequisite is a filter, and filters are exactly what a nine-boat fleet cannot afford.

Dillon charged nothing and required no registration. The five new members came afterwards, as a consequence of the racing rather than a condition of it — which is the correct order of operations. Run year one free, see who shows up, and add back only the requirements you genuinely miss.

3. Split the fleet so a newcomer knows where they belong

Berkeley Yacht Club opened its 2026 Friday night series with 13 boats and a beautifully unserious division structure: not PHRF bands, but "slow or small" and "fast and big." The racing itself was tight — 35 seconds separated the top two in one division, 66 in the other.

The point isn't the joke. It's that a cruiser who has never raced can work out which group they're in from the dock, without a rating certificate and without asking anyone. Compare that to a division list written as PHRF 111–150 non-spinnaker, which is information only to people who already race.

Chicago goes further and runs a Green (novice) section alongside its JAM and spinnaker divisions. A first-timer racing other first-timers finishes mid-fleet instead of last, and mid-fleet is the result that brings someone back next week.

4. Start them in reverse

A pursuit start — slowest boats away first, start times staggered by rating so the fleet converges at the finish — solves two problems that a conventional line does not.

The first is fear. Reverse-PHRF guidance is blunt about it: the format "removes huge obstacle to new racers, who may still be uncomfortable manoeuvring in such close proximity to other boats" — because it gives the whole starting line to one boat at a time. In a pursuit, the slow boats, which is to say the newcomers and the cruisers, get the line almost to themselves.

The second is comprehension. In a handicap fleet, nobody knows who's winning until a spreadsheet says so hours later. In a pursuit, the boat ahead of you is the boat you're beating. First across the line wins, and even the most humble vessel in the fleet has a genuine claim on the trophy.

The precedent is strong. San Diego YC's Hot Rum pursuit series is among the best-attended gatherings in Southern California, and San Francisco's Three Bridge Fiasco — pursuit start, boats choose their own course and direction — draws 300-plus boats. Neither is an accident.

5. Solve the crew problem out loud

The standing absurdity of club racing: skippers can't find crew, would-be crew can't find boats, and both are standing in the same parking lot. Nobody fixes it because everyone assumes someone else has.

Chicago's series leads with it. The headline on the page is "No Boat? No Experience? No Problem!" and it sends people straight to an organised crew meet-up rather than a webpage. Its stated mission is introducing racing to newcomers "in a positive, casual atmosphere" — which is a promise about the crowd, not the course.

On the boat side, Karl Felger's guide to running a beer-can programme is mostly about people management: set the crew schedule early because summer calendars fill fast, prep the boat together so the team owns it, actively bring friends, family and coworkers aboard, and — his emphasis — turn the music up and keep the yelling down. A skipper who shouts on a Wednesday night costs the fleet a sailor.

This is also the growth mechanism that compounds. US Sailing's 2024 survey of one-design classes found that the classes which grew cited volunteer support, deliberate promotion of first-time sailors, and affordable boat access, while the ones in decline cited cost, aging membership and barriers to entry. Almost nothing on the growth list is about sailing.

6. Don't let race committee duty eat the fleet

Here's the failure mode nobody puts in the annual report. Arizona Yacht Club, auditing its own decline, found fleets down to two or three boats on a Sunday — and identified that race committee duty was removing still more boats from the line. The infrastructure was subtracting from the fleet it existed to serve.

It compounds viciously in a small series: the fewer boats you have, the more often your RC turn comes around, and the less appealing the whole thing gets. It also quietly kills the race that never happens — six boats want to sail Thursday, nobody wants to be the seventh sitting still with a clipboard, so nobody sails.

Two proven ways to shrink the burden. First, build courses on existing government marks and navigation aids so nobody sets buoys — one of several format twists Bruce Bingman catalogued in Sailing World, alongside point-to-point races that finish at a waterfront restaurant and start windows that let boats pick their own moment inside a range. Second, stop requiring a committee boat at all.

7. Be findable by people who aren't already members

Australian Sailing listed "low awareness and discoverability, online and in the community" among its six core challenges and made digital discoverability one of four strategic pillars. Sit with what that means: a meaningful share of the people who would race simply do not know the race is happening.

A series that lives in a members-only newsletter, a PDF notice and a clubhouse bulletin board is invisible to precisely the population you're trying to reach. The sailor who just bought a used 30-footer and would happily show up on a Wednesday has no way to find out you exist.

8. Publish results the same night

Corrected results that arrive by email on Friday are how a mixed fleet loses its newcomers. Every close finish becomes an argument in the interim, and the sailor who got beaten on a rating they don't understand — days after they'd stopped thinking about the race — usually doesn't come back for the explanation.

Publish the ratings before the first gun and the corrected standings before people leave the bar. The results should be the last thing that happens at the race, not the first thing that happens the following week.

What it actually adds up to

Nothing in Dillon's playbook was clever. No sponsorship, no rebrand, no new fleet of club-owned boats. They ran short races on a weeknight, charged nothing, wrote four rules, let anything with a keel enter, and did it 23 times in 12 weeks. The fleet nearly tripled and five cruising families ended up joining the club.

The research says the same thing at national scale: people are leaving racing over time, cost, access and friction — not because sailing stopped being good. Friction is the one a club can attack this season, and a weeknight series is the lowest-risk place to attack it. If it doesn't work, you've lost a summer of Wednesdays.

Start with nine boats. Take away everything that isn't racing. See where you are in twelve weeks.

Sources

1. D. B. Tanner, "How to run a proper Beer Can Race" — Scuttlebutt Sailing News, 27 February 2019 (Dillon Yacht Club, Lake Dillon, Colorado).
2. Karl Felger, "Managing a Successful Beer Can Series" — Scuttlebutt Sailing News, 14 June 2017.
3. Chicago Beer Can Series — hosted by Columbia Yacht Club; course, schedule, division and newcomer information.
4. "Berkeley Yacht Club Kicks Off Friday Night Racing" — Latitude 38, 20 March 2026.
5. Bruce Bingman, "Keep the Racing Fun with These Creative Twists" — Sailing World, 12 May 2025.
6. "Five tips for reverse PHRF racing" — Scuttlebutt Sailing News, 11 May 2023, reprinting Heather Mahady, "Pursuit of Happiness: 5 Tips for Reverse PHRF Racing" — UK Sailmakers, 9 May 2023.
7. "A Quick Guide to Pursuit Racing" — Shotwick Lake Sailing.
8. "New National Participation Review Calls for the Australian Sailing Community to Unite" — Australian Sailing, 25 July 2025.
9. "Variables that impact participation" — Scuttlebutt Sailing News, 10 March 2025, reporting US Sailing's 2024 Survey of One Design Classes.
10. "How Do We Break Down Barriers to Racing?" — Arizona Yacht Club, 20 July 2018.
11. "How to boost participation in sailing" — Scuttlebutt Sailing News, 20 May 2026.
12. John Palizza, "Guide to running sailboat races" — Scuttlebutt Sailing News, 17 April 2023.